Speaker Profile
Ph.D., Co-founder and CEO, Guardant Health
Biography
Helmy Eltoukhy, PhD, is currently the co-founder and CEO of Guardant Health, the market leader in liquid biopsies. Helmy’s prior startup, Avantome, was a leader in low-cost sequencing before being acquired by Illumina. Helmy served as the senior director of scientific research at Illumina, where he was responsible for the development of novel chemistries, hardware, and informatics for genetics analysis systems.Helmy began his career at the Stanford Genome Technology Center, where he invented the first semiconductor sequencing platform and the first base-calling algorithm for next-gen sequencing. He earned his PhD, MS, and BS degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford.
Talk
Liquid Biopsy Applications and New Horizons
Rapid adoption of liquid biopsy as a tool for therapy selection in late-stage cancer patients has sparked a wave of investment and interest in similar technology. As data accumulates and test performance continues to improve, exciting applications are on the horizon.
Session Abstract – PMWC 2017 Silicon Valley
Session Synopsis: There are technical hurdles related to liquid biopsy but these appear to be solvable. One possible biological barrier and fundamental issue is having a high enough analyte concentration in blood to measure and quantitate. As we gain more experience with this class and type of biomarker it is expected that technical advances will enable additional liquid biopsy applications in the clinical setting.
