Delivering industry-leading analytic software and services: Golden Helix

"Golden Helix acts as your analytic partner, not just an external resource.”

Golden Helix has been delivering industry-leading bioinformatics solutions for the advancement of life science research and translational medicine for over 17 years. 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 microarrays and next-generation sequencing. With its solutions, hundreds of the world’s top pharmaceutical, biotech and academic research organizations are able to harness the full potential of genomics to identify the cause of disease, improve the efficacy and safety of drugs, develop genomic diagnostics and advance the quest for personalized medicine. Golden Helix products and services have been cited in over 1,000 peer-reviewed publications.

The company stands differentiated with its simple annual subscription model and customer support. Rather than charge per sample fees like many of its competitors, it has chosen to offer its licenses at a flat annual fee. This provides clients certainty about their budget and allows them to rerun samples without considering the effect on expenses. Secondly, the customer support team is second to none. They pride themselves on providing free and unlimited training and support, and offer customers very quick turnaround times, typically just one day.

Best-in-class AnalyticSoftware
Golden Helix’s VarSeq software streamlines the process of annotating and filtering variants obtained from next generation sequencing pipelines, allowing both research scientists and clinicians to find variants of interest in a very efficient and straightforward manner. VarSeq simplifies the user interface and provides a scalable architecture featuring repeatable workflows, note taking and reporting and filter parameter prototyping.

VarSeq additionally offers high throughput environments via VSPipeline which allows for the creation of workflow-encoded project templates, locking down quality control and filtering parameters, automating bioinformatics pipelines and providing the requirements needed for CLIA and CAP certified analysis. Out of automated pipelines come fully produced VarSeq projects, ready for the technical and medical staff to jump into variant interpretation and reporting.

VSWarehouse is a genomic database that holds all samples processed in a clinical lab. It provides clinicians and researchers the ability to retrieve any type information related to the samples that were processed in a lab over many years, including variant call sets, clinical reports and catalogs of variant assessments.

The SNP & Variation Suite (SVS) is an integrated collection of user-friendly, yet powerful analytic tools for managing, analyzing and visualizing multifaceted genomic and phenotypic data. SVS was created specifically to empower biologists and other researchers to easily perform complex analyses and visualizations, eliminating the need to rely exclusively on bioinformatics experts or use incompatible freeware. SVS is used by hundreds of genetic and pharmacogenomic researchers in academia, government, and industry all over the world. With hundreds of citations in peer reviewed articles, SVS boasts a reputation for performance, usability, reliability and fast time to results.

The GenomeBrowse visualization tool provides an intuitive and powerful way to explore the DNA-seq and RNA-seq pile-up and coverage data by providing stunning visualizations of the genomic data that give you the power to see what is occurring at each base pair in the samples. A high performance backend is paired with an intuitive user interface to make sure that the discovery process is fluid and streamlined. And the best part? GenomeBrowse is 100% free!

The Future Sight

Pervasiveness: The company has a strong competence in building on-premises solutions for the life science space. To date, many labs, hospitals and government organizations prefer to control the IT environment over cloud solutions. However, as the clinical testing space goes mainstream, cloud deployment models are attractive for certain market segments. Its future development plans include a strategy to deploy the Golden Helix stack in a way that customers can pick and choose their preferred deployment model whether it be an on premise solution, a cloud based solution or a mixed deployment.

Internationalization: The US has been a strong market for clinical testing and research analytics products and services. However, selected markets in Europe, Asia and Latin America, as well as Australia and the Middle East are increasingly important. Its mid-term strategy is to increase its local presence in these markets either through partners or directly.

Preservation: Golden Helix has a strong customer base with a high renewal rate. Its high rate of customer satisfaction and the stickiness of its solution is one of the reasons why Golden Helix has been highly capital efficient. It continues to focus on a high quality customer experience to encourage future renewals.

The Client Spectrum

• Testing labs: Prevention Genetics, Northshore Diagnostics, Rutgers NCI lab

• Hospitals: Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
  Pharmaceutical companies: GSK, AbbVie, Takeda, Bayer

• Major research organizations: Stanford, Yale, Cornell. Its clients have successfully leveraged its various analytics platforms to publish in major publications such as Science, Nature and Nature Genetics.

• Government organizations: NIH, NCI and FDA

“Being an informatics person, my job is to set the system up. Now that it’s up and running, the molecular pathologist can run the samples. They do not need an informatics person to run every sample.”– Dr. Jeffrey Rosenfeld, Bioinformatics Scientist

“The VarSeq software provides beautiful filtering and annotation for our samples. However, what really impressed us was the ability of VSWarehouse to help us to generate a population catalogue specific to the Ashkenazi Jewish community.”
– Chaim Jalas, Director of Genetic Resources & Services

Meet the Master

Dr. Andreas Scherer: Andreas is the President &CEO of Golden Helix. He has an extensive background in Sales, Marketing, Product Development, Services, Operations and Management, along with a PhD in Computer Science. He demonstrates a proven business acumen and the ability to drive change, consistently delivering bottom line results. He serves on the board of a number of for-profit and non-for-profit organizations. Dr. Scherer is the author of a prize winning business book “Be Fast or Be Gone”. He is regularly quoted by media outlets such as Forbes and E-Commerce Times and is an international speaker on topics such as Precision Medicine.

“We design integrated and user-friendly tools trusted by thousands of researchers & clinicians worldwide.”