BioSpace 40 Under 40 honoree Louisa Helms is a lot of things—athlete, scientist, entrepreneur and likely future biotech executive. Just don’t ask her to pick up any pipettes.
Louisa Helms had a real-life Ms. Frizzle as her librarian in high school. Instead of a magic school bus, however, her Ms. Frizzle had a flow cytometer and 3D printer, and she’d take students on field trips to real labs.
This is how Helms, now a partner at Flagship Pioneering, got into biotech. The librarian’s name was Tammy Carabello, and she provided a model of lifetime learning for Helms and her peers at that Seattle high school. Carabello later became a biotech teacher and ultimately went back to school for her PhD.
“She’s my guiding light,” Helms, who was recently named one of BioSpace’s 40 Under 40 leaders, said in an interview. “And she introduced me to Cat in the Hat when I was even younger. So, like, best of both worlds.”
Now, Helms is lighting her own way. After her high school experience, she pursued science, taking a break before her PhD to consider what she would do with her education. “I wanted to be making decisions in science, and the people who make decisions in science are in positions of power,” she said.
After completing her education, Helms began entrepreneurial training to prepare for a career as a decision-maker. She found herself working with venture capitalists and companies in the Seattle ecosystem. In 2022, she got a major break. She applied for a job at renowned biotech venture firm Flagship.
“Flagship was notorious. I knew what it was, and the role was just this, like mystical, mysterious, mythical, perfect role,” Helms said.
To Helms’ surprise, she got the job.
“It’s become everything I thought it would be, and more,” Helms said of the job, which she began in 2022. “It was an entrepreneurial training ground, such that we would actually learn what warrants taking a scientific idea and turning it commercial and turning it into something you would build and test.”
The first company Helms got to help build was Serif Biomedicines, which officially launched in April with a mission to develop modified DNA medicines. She remembers helping design experiments, ordering reagents and working with the scientists who were executing the vision. She also jumped in to help with corporate development and helped build out a therapeutics workstream for a program.
“My involvement in the company has been extremely all-encompassing but what I’m really proud of is just the impact on the science I was able to make early,” Helms said.
She clarifies—with a laugh—that she wasn’t actually at the bench. “I do not touch pipettes. That would be a disservice to these companies.”
Rather, she offers up her unique range of skills whenever she is needed on the job. Beyond biotech, Helms is an athlete, competing in CrossFit where her “training mindset” comes from. This is a point of pride, she says, that has kept her grounded and taught her discipline and the value of hard work. “I think people forget that by being a whole human, you do your job better than when you’re just a work human,” she said.
Helms has now risen to principal at Flagship and is credited as a co-founder of Serif. The biotech has since launched out of the Flagship universe and Helms is mostly on to her next project, a secretive biotech that remains undercover. Her exact role in the next venture is yet to be determined and she demurred at the suggestion that she might serve as CEO. She’s learning at Flagship how to step back for the right people.
That said, Helms emphasized that her ultimate goal is to be a serial biotech CEO—a role many of her Flagship peers also embrace.
“I’m lucky that I get to kind of stay connected to Serif and see it mature and grow,” she said, “but what is important about our role at Flagship is knowing when to hire yourself out of your job and give it to someone who’s doing it better than you.”
