Mohamed Helmy

Dr. Mohamed Helmy is a computational systems biologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO). He obtained his undergraduate degree in Genetics from the School of Agriculture, Al-Azhar University (Cairo, Egypt) and a postgraduate diploma in Information Technology from the Information Technology Institute (ITI) (Giza, Egypt). Mohamed got his MSc and PhD degrees in Computational Systems Biology from Keio University (Tokyo, Japan). He completed his postdoctoral training in Bioinformatics at the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Kyoto University (Kyoto, Japan) and the School of Medicine, University of Toronto (Toronto, Canada).  

After his postdoctoral training, Mohamed worked as the Head of Bioinformatics at BenchSci.com where he led the development of the bioinformatics platform of the Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based biological reagents search engine. In 2019, Mohamed joined the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) (Singapore) and worked as a Senior Bioinformatics Specialist and a Research Scientist at the Singapore Institute for Biotechnology and Food Innovation(SIFBI) and the Bioinformatics Institute (BII), respectively. He is an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Lakehead University (Thunder Bay, Canada) and an Affiliated Faculty at the Department of Computer Science, Idaho State University (ISU) (Idaho, USA). 

Dr. Helmy joined VIDO in 2023 to establish a research group focused on Bioinformatics and Systems Biology applications in vaccine and infectious diseases. His research interests are highly interdisciplinary including computer science, biomedical sciences, public health and immunology, with a special focus in software tools and database systems development. He focuses on modelling of the animal and human innate immunity signalling pathways involved in bacterial and viral infections diseases, inflammatory diseases and cancer, mainly TLR3, TLR4 and TNF-alpha pathways and on the analysis of omics data.  

Publications