The Blood Test That Could Detect Thousands of Diseases | Helmy Eltoukhy, Guardant Health

Helmy Eltoukhy (0:00)

Mission statement is conquering cancer with data. Every great advancement in medicine has come from seeing something that was once invisible.

Mark Jacobstein (0:08)

What's the most optimistic scenario?

Helmy Eltoukhy (0:10)

Non-oncology applications, basically using our blood test as a sort of everything test to detect hundreds, if not thousands of diseases. Diagnostics is a tough business. In most other areas that are not regulated, you build it and you ship it. Here, you have to build it, you have to validate it. There's regulatory approvals or reimbursement. You have to kind of understand the space you're playing in.

Mark Jacobstein (0:35)

I'm Mark Jacobstein. I'm one of the partners here at South Park Commons, but for today's conversation, I'm also a former Guardant Health employee and I used to work for Helmy, have a lot of very fond memories as he was helping to build what has become one of the canonical companies in the history of molecular diagnostics, arguably the most important company in molecular diagnostics probably ever. For those of you who don't know, very briefly, Helmy is now the co-CEO and Chairman of Guardant Health, a $20 billion molecular diagnostics company. But really interesting career journey, starting as a deep nerd, double E, PhD. I want to start with some questions about the path, because it's not obvious as you were double E undergrad as well. Yes.

Helmy Eltoukhy (1:14)

Yeah, it was.

Mark Jacobstein (1:15)

Yeah. The path from double E into biology circa 2006, 2008, how did that happen?

Walk us through that, through Avantome and to Guardant.

Helmy Eltoukhy (1:30)

I was always, I think, drawn to health care somehow. I remember looking at something I wrote in kindergarten, where it said that, what do you want to be when you grow up? And it said, football player or neurosurgeon.

I think I was drawn to the fact that biology just seemed like very poorly understood. The brain was obviously very complex structure, and really being able to help people.

And when you think about health care and a health care journey, if anyone's been through one, it's one of the most sort of frustrating things you can imagine, like not knowing what's wrong with your body, not knowing what's going to happen next. And so I loved math, I loved science, I loved physics, but there was always, I think, sort of a yearning to do something that is more directly helping people sort of one-on-one. I flirted, I think, with pre-med in undergrad, but like most people, I didn't find it. Wasn't my cup of tea, I would say. I preferred electrical engineering for computer science. And then it was actually fortuitous during my PhD program. I loved circuit design, device physics, but frankly I couldn't compete with all the people who were like super geniuses from Sharif University in Iran and some of those other places. And I saw this project that was essentially combining DNA sequencing with semiconductors. And so it was a sort of slippery slope. And I was always good at biology and just sort of married those two things. And I think in retrospect, I say that the valleys between two well-trodden sort of peaks and well-trodden disciplines are where a lot of the opportunities lie. And that's exactly what it was fortuitous. I didn't plan it, but that's sort of what sort of happened over the coming years, is looking at where can you steal ideas from one area and apply them to another field. That is, I think, the easiest way to innovation. I was at, there's this meeting that happens in Lendau, Germany every year called the Lendau Nobel Prize meeting. And I got fortunate enough a couple of years ago to get invited to that. And essentially, they invite all the existing, all the living Nobel Prize winners to that meeting. And they do all these like, somehow me, but like, there's like hundreds of students there. It's like five or six hundred people. And they're essentially giving lectures all weeks. For a week, you're like, you're back, you're a student, you're hearing these amazing lectures from these Nobel Prize winners. And I think Stephen Shude said that, basically said, he's a Stanford Nobel Prize winner in physics. And he said, yeah, the easiest way to win a Nobel Prize is to take something from one field and apply it to another one. And I think that's true just in general. It's like, if you can pattern match between two different areas, you can, I think, really make a lot of progress.

Mark Jacobstein (4:33)

I love that in part because I think you're literally giving like the SPC pitch here, which is to take as many bright people from different fields and stick them in a place together and sort of see what comes out of it. And I'm curious to sort of a little bit more about that path because you started with, so you got the interest in biology, you did the postdoc work, and then immediately out of the postdoc, started of Antome. Say a little bit more about that path. And I'm curious, like, how did you end up with Mustafa, so Mustafa Renagi, your co-founder, ended up as the CTO of Illumina. So like, how did this all happen?