Helix Labs

Helix sequences and interprets rare-disease panels for hospital labs. Their science is careful. Their website was a series of stock molecules and a contact form that went to marketing. Clinicians were arriving via PDF from a conference, then bouncing.

The brief

Rebuild the public site and the clinician portal as one system. Make the science legible without flattening it. Stop looking like a Series B that wants to be a consumer brand. Ship in four months, before a European tender.

The work

We sat with two lab directors and a genetic counsellor and wrote the information architecture from their questions, not from Helix’s org chart. Panels, turnaround, sample handling, the actual report — in that order. Language was edited with their medical writer until every sentence could be read aloud in a clinic.

The build is deliberately plain: fast, structured, accessible, with a CMS the scientific team can update without a ticket. Motion is reserved for one thing — how a panel is read — and then it stops.

It is the first link the commercial team sends. That has never been true of a Helix website. Dr. Priya Raman, Chief Medical Officer

What changed

Time on the science pages is up threefold. The tender was submitted with the site as the primary exhibit. Portal tickets from “I cannot find the report” dropped to a handful a month. Helix still looks like a lab. That was the point.