About Andreas Scherer
Dr. Andreas Scherer is CEO of Golden Helix. The company has been delivering industry leading bioinformatics solutions for the advancement of life science research and translational medicine for over a decade. 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 next-generation sequencing. With its solutions, hundreds of the world’s hospitals and testing labs are able to harness the full potential of genomics to identify the cause of disease, develop genomic diagnostics, and advance the quest for personalized medicine. Golden Helix products and services have been cited in thousands of peer-reviewed publications. Golden Helix is also on the Inc 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the US.
He is also Managing Partner of Salto Partners, Inc, a management consulting firm headquartered in Nevada. He has extensive experience successfully managing growth as well as orchestrating complex turnaround situations. His company, Salto Partners, advises on business strategy, financing, sales, and operations. Clients are operating in the high-tech and life sciences space.
Dr. Scherer holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Hagen, Germany, and a Master of Computer Science from the University of Dortmund, Germany. He is author and co- author of over 20 international publications and has written books on project management, the Internet, and artificial intelligence. His latest book, “Be Fast Or Be Gone”, is a prizewinner in the 2012 Eric Hoffer Book Awards competition, and has been named a finalist in the 2012 Next Generation Indie Book Awards!
Personal genome sequencing is rapidly changing the landscape of clinical genetics. With this development also comes a new set of challenges. For example, every sequenced exome presents the clinical geneticist with thousands of variants. The job at hand is to find out which one might be responsible for the person’s illness. In order to reduce the search space, clinicians use various methods… Read more »
This year’s abstract challenge was another great success. We received over 30 submissions and topics ranged from GWAS to RNA Seq to exome sequencing, and the list goes on. With so many excellent submissions this year, we chose 4 winners, with a tie for 3rd place. Dr. Sergey Kornilov Our first place winner is Dr. Sergey Kornilov, a Postdoctoral Associate… Read more »
TriCon 2015 was well worth the visit to San Francisco. The combination of extensive programming in conjunction with a large exhibition makes it a must-attend event for scientist and professionals in our industry and the conference seems to grow year after year. This year, we paid a lot of attention to the Clinical Sequencing portion of the event. In this track,… Read more »
The Plant & Animal Genome XXIII Conference (PAG) was again a success. It’s the venue for leading genetic scientists and researchers involved in plant and animal research to meet with their peers. If anything the event continues to grow. The largest population of registrations tend to be from an Academic background (64%), with Industry (25%) and Government (11%) sectors comprising… Read more »
In 1914 the German cytologist Theodor Boveri coined the phrase “Cancer is a disease of the genome”. At this time his ideas were equally revolutionary as they were highly contested. Fast forward. More than hundred years later, Next-Generation Sequencing effectively permits a highly sensitive analysis of cancer cells. It can help us to understand mutations associated with cancer development and… Read more »
There is a lot we can be grateful for at Golden Helix. The past year was marked by two major breakthrough launches. Earlier in 2014, we shipped SVS 8 which unified SVS with our GenomeBrowse product. We were able to improve SVS’ data management and visualization capabilities. In addition we added a number of new methods in SVS, such as SKAT-O, MM-KBAC, and various genomic prediction algorithms.
It’s cliche, I know, but wow…2014 flew by! And what a great year it was for the Golden Helix team – we made upgrades to both GenomeBrowse and SVS and released a brand new product – VarSeq! In April, we released GenomeBrowse 2.0, which was a reflection of our most frequent user requests. Users now have the ability to upload… Read more »
Last month, I announced our Golden Helix Gives Back Campaign. During times like this, when funding is tight, we wanted to make a statement to our community. We at Golden Helix are committed to empower researchers and practitioners in the life science field. For those hard working people it is nice to catch a break from time to time. After… Read more »
The major interest in genomic prediction is best understood by looking at the growth of the human population. Over the last few hundred years we have experienced an increase in population due to medical advances and massive increase in agricultural productivity. The planet’s population continues to explode: from 1 billion in 1820 to 2 billion in 1930, 3 billion in… Read more »
Last year, as part of our ongoing commitment to empower genetic research, we hosted our first research competition. The competition was very successful and now we will make the competition an annual event. Here at Golden Helix, we are dedicated to creating powerful software that enables researchers to complete complex analysis. This competition allows us to enable discovery by awarding… Read more »
Over the last several years, NIH funding and academic budgets have been taking drastic cuts. This means for many of our clients, that they have to submit more grants than ever. We want to give the community a bit of break.
To make a long story short, we had a blast at ASHG14. The traffic at our booth was terrific. Every day we had scheduled presentations on VarSeq, SVS, and GenomeBrowse which were very well attended. And of course, there were our new t-shirts. The new designs were well received. If anything we promise to bring more next year. In particular more… Read more »
The 64th annual ASHG meeting is coming up in just a few short weeks in San Diego. This year’s event will be an exciting one for Golden Helix as we present VarSeq, with the first demonstration on Sunday at 11:30 am in booth 422. After the demonstration we will have some great VarSeq t-shirts to give away – you will not… Read more »
The adoption of genetic services is key to our ability to provide personalized medicine in the future. The goal is to better diagnose diseases, predict their outcomes, and to choose the best possible care option for a patient. Our part here at Golden Helix is to essentially build the equivalent of an MRI for the genome. In this process the latest… Read more »
We had a lot to celebrate recently. Last year was the 300th anniversary of Jacob Bernoulli’s Ars Conjectandi. In this book he consolidated central ideas in probability theory, such as the very first version of the law of large numbers. It was also the 250th anniversary of Bayes theorem named after Thomas Bayes (1701–1761), who first suggested using the theorem to update beliefs.
Genomic research is exploding. There is a plethora of new methods and workflows for research and clinical use. While we are a software company at heart, we find ourselves in the role of educators. Our customer interactions are about informing, teaching, and consulting. A few years back, we started with regular webcasts that took this idea to the next level…. Read more »
Over the last decade, DNA sequencing has made vast technological improvements. With the cost of sequencing decreasing significantly, sequencing technology has become a product for the masses. The sequencing technology and programs that were once used exclusively by major research institutions are now becoming available in many research facilities around the globe. These tools produce large amounts of data sets… Read more »
Earlier this year we completed the marriage of SVS and GenomeBrowse. When we released Version 8 of SVS we completed a major engineering task. A lot of things under the hood of both products had been changed to create a seamless experience for our users. The new and improved SVS platform is based on a technology stack that allows us… Read more »
We released GenomeBrowse 2.0 earlier this year, allowing users to review all types of genomic data. Since then, it has received rave reviews from thousands of users around the world. Essentially, it’s the Google Earth app for genomic data. GenomeBrowse allows a user to sift through vast amounts of genomic data, and make it easy to focus on a single part… Read more »
As I write this article, Golden Helix has hundreds of clients in top research institutions world-wide. The adoption of our product at these institutions ranges from a few individual users to site licenses used by entire organizations. Because of the quality of SNP & Variation Suite (SVS) and GenomeBrowse, our competence in the field is recognized, and increasingly our clients… Read more »