Featured in Clinical OMICs: Enabling Precision Medicine with Cutting-Edge NGS Technologies

· Andreas Scherer · Big Picture, News, Events, & Announcements

It is an honor to be featured in the Clinical OMICs May/June 2020 issue in a Q&A with the Editor discussing the past, present, and future of Golden Helix.

In this article, I detail:

  • Our most significant success throughout the past five years
  • How our products differentiate Golden Helix in the market
  • Our most significant opportunities in the next five years.

Clinical OMICs Article:

What has been Golden Helix’s most significant success or contribution to the industry over the past five years?

Golden Helix started in 1998 with a focus on research, but over the last five years, that focus has shifted as we began to establish a strong presence in the clinical market. Today, our solutions are being used in hundreds of organizations around the world, enabling labs to conduct high-end next-generation sequencing (NGS) analytics in many different spaces such as cancer diagnostics, rare diseases, and infectious diseases. By leveraging our NGS solutions, labs can determine treatment options. For example, in the cancer space there is a significant amount of specialty drugs to prescribe for specific cancer types. Our solutions make this process repeatable, scalable, and more efficient by reducing the amount of time it takes to generate a clinical report. Our solutions ensure high quality while increasing throughput.

What products or services do you currently offer that differentiate you in the market?

What truly sets apart our clinical products that are serving the cancer, rare, and infectious disease diagnosticsmarket is our simple business model with no per-sample costs. Our products are available through an annual license fee, which allows our customers to retain all the efficiences they generate in the lab, reducing the cost per samples.

Our product VS-CNV is a market-leading solution for the detection of copy number variations in NGS data. VS-CNV also eliminates the need for confirmatory methods such as MLPA or microarray since it can conduct the analysis within of the NGS paradigm. Our workflow products, VSClinical, and the VSClinical AMP, are increasing the throughput of clinical report generation for labs in the rare disease and cancer space.

We have the unique ability to deploy our solutions in multiple ways. There is the on-premises deployment model that runs our software on inhouse servers. If need be, we can run in this paradigm completely without any internet connectivity; this is extremely important for some of our government customers. Other customers choose to deploy our software stack in a private cloud setting. We are proud to be able to accommodate a wide range of deployment scenarios catering to the specific needs of our customers.

What are your company’s most significant opportunities in the next five years?

As I mentioned, we have had significant traction in the clinical space over the last five years. We plan to take this development to the next level by accelerating our engagement with international customers in Europe, Asia, Australia, the Middle East, and South America. Our products offer exciting opportunities for precision medicine and have had significant impact in the industry. We have also established several new use cases for our solutions that extend into the infectious disease space, which recently came to fruition with the COVID-19 pandemic. We have developed unique capabilities for clinicians and researchers focused on COVID-19, and the analysis of SARS-CoV-2, and expect to deliver more on this in the near future.

If you are interested in reading the full article, please click here to access the May/June 2020 issue.

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Andreas Scherer

About Andreas Scherer

Dr. Andreas Scherer is CEO of Golden Helix. The company has been delivering industry leading bioinformatics solutions for the advancement of life science research and translational medicine for over a decade. Its innovative technologies and analytic services empower scientists and healthcare professionals at all levels to derive meaning from the rapidly increasing volumes of genomic data produced from next-generation sequencing. With its solutions, hundreds of the world’s hospitals and testing labs are able to harness the full potential of genomics to identify the cause of disease, develop genomic diagnostics, and advance the quest for personalized medicine. Golden Helix products and services have been cited in thousands of peer-reviewed publications. Golden Helix is also on the Inc 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the US. He is also Managing Partner of Salto Partners, Inc, a management consulting firm headquartered in Nevada.  He has extensive experience successfully managing growth as well as orchestrating complex turnaround situations. His company, Salto Partners, advises on business strategy, financing, sales, and operations. Clients are operating in the high-tech and life sciences space. Dr. Scherer holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Hagen, Germany, and a Master of Computer Science from the University of Dortmund, Germany. He is author and co- author of over 20 international publications and has written books on project management, the Internet, and artificial intelligence. His latest book, “Be Fast Or Be Gone”, is a prizewinner in the 2012 Eric Hoffer Book Awards competition, and has been named a finalist in the 2012 Next Generation Indie Book Awards! 

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