Helicos BioSciences Corporation was a publicly traded life science company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts focused on genetic analysis technologies for the research, drug discovery and diagnostic markets.

The firm's Helicos Genetic Analysis Platform was the first DNA-sequencing instrument to operate by imaging individual DNA molecules.

Helicos's technology images the extension of individual DNA molecules using a defined primer and individual fluorescently labeled nucleotides, which contain a "Virtual Terminator" preventing incorporation of multiple nucleotides per cycle.

[3][4] In the August 2009 issue of Nature Biotechnology, Dr. Stephen Quake, a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University and a co-founder of Helicos BioSciences, sequenced his own genome, using Single Molecule Sequencing for under $50,000 in reagents.

[6] The patents that Helicos had licensed from Cal Tech (where Quake was when he made the underlying inventions) were subsequently licensed to Direct Genomics, founded by Jiankui He, a former post-doc in Quake's lab who gained notoriety in November 2018 when he created the first germline genome-edited babies.