Nabeel Trimzi
PM
Presidential Scholar at USC studying neuroscience and business finance, building at the intersection of neuromodulation, medicine, and biotech.
Helios
F'25Streamlining early-stage drug discovery.
Healthcare
About
Helios is an AI-powered platform that helps drug discovery teams identify which compounds are worth testing before costly lab validation. Early-stage drug development is defined by uncertainty, where scientists must evaluate thousands of candidates across critical factors like toxicity, stability, and target binding, yet have no reliable way to do so without slow and expensive experiments. As a result, over 90% of drug candidates fail during hit-to-lead optimization, often after months of work and significant capital have already been spent. Advances in AI have only increased the number of potential candidates, intensifying this bottleneck and causing teams to waste 6-18 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars pursuing the wrong compounds and delaying life-saving breakthroughs.
Product
Helios provides a predictive workflow for early-stage drug discovery, enabling scientists to evaluate and prioritize compounds before entering the lab. Users upload candidate compounds, and the platform analyzes molecular structure and behavior to generate predictions on key properties such as toxicity, stability, and target binding. Helios augments these insights with evidence from structurally similar compounds and their known experimental outcomes, giving researchers clear, data-backed context for decision-making. By allowing teams to filter, compare, and confidently select the most promising candidates, Helios reduces unnecessary testing, accelerates iteration cycles, and helps bring effective therapies to market faster.
Founders
Heather Liu
Designer
Heather studies cognitive science at USC and is a product designer focused on healthcare systems. She has worked at Blue Shield and across early-stage startups.
Parker Gurney
Developer
Parker studies computer science at USC. She is a developer at Perfit and previously worked on data systems and infrastructure at startups.
Sanjna Sunil
Developer
Sanjna studies CECS at USC. Previously interned at PayPal. Builds across full-stack systems and product.