Felix Bustos III was an aerospace engineer for more than a decade before his mother passed of cancer, causing a pivot in his career that would culminate in Bustos co-founding HelenHealth with the objective of detecting and preventing cancer early.
Named after Bustos’ mother, HelenHealth was soft launched in 2019 after Bustos began pursuing a degree in information management systems that would allow him to create the health care venture. The company was developed at the Harvard Innovation Labs’ Venture Incubation Program and accelerated through Harvard Medical School’s Healthcare Innovation & Commercialization fall 2020 cohort.
Valencia-based HelenHealth’s first version was a website that connected people with oncology resources such as nutrition, equipment, beauty, books and more.
HelenHealth has free and paid memberships and serves around 30,000 people and is growing, according to Bustos. Members of the community have access to newsletters and fireside chats with experts in addition to the other resources the website offers.
This year, the platform is bolstered by a recently launched artificial intelligence recommender that after gathering genetic testing results and questionnaires, connects people with genetic counselors, nutritionists and fitness trainers specializing in cancer.
“We’ve given kits to people, 23andMe kits that they are able to understand what their health risk factors are and then we’ve analyzed for a number of them what the course of action is,” Bustos said. “Right now, it’s pro bono, people within our network helping them out in terms of coming up with a game plan, so they don’t even have to deal with the bad news of having cancer in the first place.”
In addition to sending and receiving saliva sample results, customers are filling out a short questionnaire that is added to a cancer/health risk profile on them. The process is HIPAA compliant, according to Bustos.
HelenHealth’s other co-founder is Dr. Alina Grinev, a precision medicine physician and clinical research scientist that works with the National Institutes of Health.
“(Alina) is an expert in genetics, that’s what she loves to do,” Bustos said. “My (role) is artificial intelligence, so being able to take that information, aggregate that information, those data points, and then be able to extrapolate that and match it with the right course of action.”
Bustos considers HelenHealth, as it currently stands, as a digital therapeutic experiment that is primarily targeting the market of people who are currently healthy but may have a history of cancer in their family. However, Bustos said, the service provided by HelenHealth is not just looking into family trees, but genetic expressions.
HelenHealth is officially launching a new version of the platform that allows for a greater number of users by the middle of this year.
The company has received funding from two rounds of angel investments and is engaging with venture capital firms.