Hierarchical Editing Language for Macromolecules (HELM)

This project created and established Hierarchical Editing Language for Macromolecules (HELM) as the industry’s complex biomolecule notation of choice

Overview

HELM (Hierarchical Editing Language for Macromolecules) enables the representation of a wide range of biomolecules including proteins, nucleotides and antibody drug conjugates, whose size and complexity render existing small-molecule and sequence-based informatics methodologies impractical or unusable. HELM is compact and flexible.

The project created a suite of HELM open source tools:

Web-editor for drawing structures, connecting monomers and calculating properties
Antibody editor for visualizing antibody domains, managing quaternary structures and performing automatic reactions
Toolkit for creating personalized applications

HELM has been widely adopted across the biopharmaceutical industry.