Our GigaAssay  Technology 

Platform Technology: The GigaAssay

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The GigaAssay is a massively parallel platform designed to functionally screen molecular activity in single cells—without requiring physical separation. It enables high-throughput analysis of how thousands of protein variants, chimeric constructs, or engineered biologics influence cellular processes in human cells. Heligenics Inc. was founded to apply the GigaAssay to the biologics industry—mapping the functional impact of large libraries of sequence variants, fusion proteins, domain swaps, and chimeras. This empowers developers of therapeutic antibodies, enzymes, and other biologics to rapidly identify optimal candidates based on actual functional outcomes in a cellular context.

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The GigaAssay was developed at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in the Schiller Laboratory of Applied Bioinformatics. Unlike conventional methods that require years to study one variant at a time, the GigaAssay can evaluate tens of thousands of sequence alterations simultaneously, delivering actionable insights in just months.

No other known assay enables cell-based functional screening of biologic constructs at this scale, resolution, and speed.

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How GigaAssay Outperforms Alternative Technologies

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Traditional methods for evaluating biologic variant function—such as deep mutational scanning (DMS)/MAVEs, predictive algorithms like PolyPhen or AlphaMissense, and low-throughput cell-based assays—face significant limitations in accuracy, reproducibility, and scalability.

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In contrast, the GigaAssay provides a direct, cell-based functional readout of variant activity with unmatched resolution and throughput. In a recent benchmark study evaluating gain-of-function (GOF) mutations in HER2, the GigaAssay achieved 100% accuracy, 100% sensitivity, and 100% positive predictive value (PPV) across 17 benchmarked variants—far surpassing alternative platforms. (download paper pdf):

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The GigaAssay’s superior performance is rooted in its experimental design: each variant is assayed in parallel under identical conditions, in human cells, and measured using UMI-barcoded clonal distributions. This structure eliminates many of the biases and artifacts seen in selection-based enrichment screens or in silico predictions.

 

Furthermore, unlike MAVEs or predictive tools that can overestimate pathogenicity (e.g., AlphaMissense flagged nearly 50% of HER2 variants as likely pathogenic—vastly exceeding clinical observations), the GigaAssay provides true functional evidence, enabling confident selection of optimal biologic variants or engineered chimeras for therapeutic development.