Helios Bioelectronics
The Design House of Innovation for Precision Medicine

It has been nearly two decades since the completion of the Human Genome Project. While the complete map of human genes has enhanced our understanding of the human body, it also revealed the sheer complexity of human genetic makeup. Also, making it abundantly clear (quite expectedly so) that we are all different from one another on a granular level. With this understanding, the healthcare industry conceived of personalizing medicine for treating human disease.

Despite continued advances, the healthcare industry still lacks a suitable solution to effectively capture the nuances and peculiarities of individual people to develop truly personalized medicine. Currently available in vitro diagnostics can help identify some specific diseases, but there are few that identify molecular level disease characteristics. Thus, the creation of precision medicines for individual patients is still a rare treatment approach.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that there is a need for faster innovation in healthcare to speed the development of effective therapies. The adoption of new tools to shorten the development time frame of precision medicines can help address these unmet needs. Bioelectronics, an often under-recognized domain, can be the approach needed to accelerate discovery and finally fulfill the promise of personalized medicine.

The core idea behind bioelectronics centers on leveraging the innate electrical properties of different biomarkers, ranging from small molecules to proteins, and even mutated cells for detection. Helios Bioelectronics seeks to revolutionize the healthcare space by embracing and implementing this breakthrough technology for the development of precision bioelectronic diagnostics. Co-founded by Dr. Hardy Wai-Hong Chanin 2016, Helios is one of the key players in the space, initiating a new era inprecision medicine. With over 33 patents worldwide, Helios is partnering with major global players in the pharmaceutical and in vitro diagnostics sectors. Speaking about the company’s passion, Chan, the chairman and CEO of Helios, says, “We are a design house of innovation in bioelectronics.”

He, however, highlights that the application of electronics to diagnose and treat a patient is not an entirely new concept. Electronic devices have been revolutionizing biology and medicine for decades. This history provides a solid foundation for pushing further into new marriages of electronics and medicine to create a new level of diagnostic with superior sensitivity and specificity.

Helios is currently developing an application-driven and highly-sensitive BioFET platform, a Lab-on-Chip bio-device enabling real-time monitoring of health status

Bioelectronics has a significant edge over some conventional tools in that regard, as it has high throughputs and visual diagnostic capabilities.

That being said, the major challenge for applying electronic components in a biological environment is the chemical incompatibility that arises due to the aqueous space of cells. Add to it the other exogenous factors, such as water content, pH value, salts, and molecular species within a cell. These aspects diminish the scope of an electronic chip to function properly in a cellular environment. With its unique design approach, Helios has proven to be adept in overcoming these hurdles. Helios has the expertise to design different types of chips according to varied specifications. By leveraging collaborations with its global partners, it has been able to overcome issues like cross-reactivity while working on immunoassays, including enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). “We bring together chip expertise, surface chemistry, and biology, and optimize each step with real field situations,” adds Chan. On that front, Helios has also made significant developments in this regard, working in partnership with two chip manufacturing companies.

Helios is currently developing an application-driven and highly-sensitive biosensor field-effect transistor(BioFET) platform, a Lab-on-Chip bio-device enabling real-time monitoring of health status. This platform can detect any targets with a net charge, including proteins, bacteria, nucleic acids, cells, and so on. It’s achieved by immobilizing the target-specific probes onto the chip surface for the target to come in and bind to its specific probe. This introduces a change of the electric current, which allows Helios to quantify the amount of target in the sample. These BioFET chips can also be readily customized and require minimal time for sample preparation. Furthermore, the platform does not require labeling for target detection. And greater than one million biosensors can fit onto a chip the size of a fingertip, allowing for the detection of multiple targets on a single BioFET chip with significant statistical power.

Backed by pioneering technology and cutting-edge engineering, Helios is poised to enable its BioFET platform to detect viruses and bacteria cells more promptly. This approach can indeed be a breakthrough in the treatment of chronic diseases, like sepsis, that need rapid assays. This technology could become an invaluable tool for the rapid diagnosis of SARS-CoV2 viral particles. There remains a significant unmet need for rapid, reliable diagnostics for a multitude of diseases across the world. “We are additionally looking at the possibility of using some of the innovative assets to facilitate the advent of new therapeutic approaches, like bacteriophage therapy, while doubling down on more accurate in vitro diagnostics,” concluded Chan.