The Orange County Business Journal profiled Laboratory for Advanced Medicine (now Helio Genomics) — new CEO Kenneth Chahine, its FDA breakthrough-designated liver cancer test, and an $86M funding round.
Featured in the Orange County Business Journal. By A. Leigh Corbett.
The Orange County Business Journal profiled the Laboratory for Advanced Medicine (LAM) — the Irvine firm that would become Helio Genomics — as it made strides among Orange County’s growing cluster of genomics-focused diagnostics companies. The five-year-old firm announced that Kenneth Chahine, Ph.D., JD, had joined as chief executive officer, effective immediately; Chahine previously launched the AncestryDNA division of Ancestry.com.
The article highlighted an active period for the company:
- Its liver cancer detection test received FDA breakthrough device designation in September 2019.
- It appointed Dr. Alan List, CEO of Moffitt Cancer Center, to its board of directors.
- Partners cited included UC Irvine, UC San Diego, and Johns Hopkins University.
- It had raised $86 million that year (about $120 million since its 2014 founding), from family offices and venture funds including South Korea’s Mirae Asset Capital.
- It employed 90 people, with facilities in Irvine, West Lafayette (IN), and Guangzhou and Beijing, China.
“I am excited to lead a mission-driven company that will bring about a global paradigm shift in early cancer detection and make a profound social impact. Laboratory for Advanced Medicine has positioned itself as one of the leaders in the field.”
Founder Dr. Shu Li, who remained chairman, said Chahine would “drive the global commercialization of our liquid biopsy pipeline of products to detect liver, colon and breast cancer at early stages.”
Source: Orange County Business Journal. Read the full article.