Overview

Gender

male

Helmy is a serial entrepreneur and pioneer in the biotech industry. After receiving his PhD, MS and BS degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, he joined the Stanford Genome Technology Center (SGTC) in 2006 to work on low-cost DNA sequencing technologies. At SGTC, he developed the first semiconductor sequencing platform and first base-calling algorithm for next-gen sequencing.
In 2007, he co-founded Avantome to commercialize a low-cost, high-performance next-gen sequencing platform to seed the democratization of next-gen sequencing. As its founding CEO, he led Avantome through two rounds of financing and through acquisition by Illumina in 2008.
At Illumina, Helmy was Sr Director of Advanced Technology Research, where he developed novel chemistries, hardware and informatics for genetic analysis systems.