Clinician burnout has been a topic of increasing concern for health systems for many years, but the COVID-19 pandemic has both exacerbated and brought much needed attention to the problem. Although multiple factors can contribute to burnout in healthcare settings, one of the most widely agreed upon challenges is documentation burden, an issue known to  … Read more

Critical to the idea of precision health is the notion that a patient’s DNA can guide their clinical care. In recent years, researchers have brought us closer to this ideal by identifying genetic variants that influence how patients respond to medications. With this information, pharmacogenomic assays have been developed to help physicians screen their patients’  … Read more

In September 2020, researchers in the UK first detected a SARS-CoV-2 variant that was more transmissible and deadly than the original strain. Later designated as the Alpha variant by the World Health Organization (WHO), the surge in cases caused by this variant led to England declaring a third national lockdown just a few months later.  … Read more

Health systems in the U.S. have always played an important role in supporting public health, but the past two years have required them to step into a more expansive role. With the unexpected demands of an unfolding pandemic, health systems have taken leading roles educating the community about the virus, organizing large-scale viral testing sites,  … Read more

Viral surveillance has once more proven its usefulness as researchers in South Africa alerted the world to the growing prevalence of Omicron—a new SARS-CoV-2 variant which, on November 26, was designated by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a Variant of Concern.1 In the short time since it was first described in South Africa in  … Read more

  In January, Helix scientists published the first pharmacogenomics study on COVID-19 vaccine reactions, reflecting the power of collecting and combining phenotypic data with comprehensive sequencing on large populations.  Scientists surveyed more than 17,000 participants from the Helix DNA Discovery Project and Healthy Nevada Project, who had their DNA previously sequenced with the Helix Exome+  … Read more

In September this year, the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) officially announced their entry into the fast expanding space of population genomics with the launch of the In Our DNA SC program. In partnership with Helix, MUSC aims to recruit 100,000 participants from diverse communities across the state over the next four years. Similarly  … Read more

Almost a year after the initial onset of COVID-19, new variants of SARS-CoV-2 emerged, spreading quickly and straining health systems globally. What can we learn from those variants and how can health system leaders gain insights into what’s to come in order to prepare their communities? Active viral surveillance is a critical part of the  … Read more

A recent paper from the Helix research team presents evidence that four additional gene-disease associations warrant consideration: GCK with diabetes mellitus, HBB with hemoglobinopathies, PKD1 with cystic kidney disease, and MIP with cataracts.

Over the past year, Helix researchers and the Helix community have helped advance our understanding of COVID-19 in a number of ways. Here, we describe some of the findings our community has contributed to. A year ago today, the world was in a much different place. For many, the prospect of a vaccine loomed in  … Read more