What is HELM?

HELM is developed by Pistoia Alliance - an industrial consortium by several leading pharmaceutical companies. BIOVIA is a longstanding partner of the Pistoia Alliance.

The „Hierarchical Editing Language for Macromolecules”* is a string based representation for complex biomolecules. Monomers are assigned short unique identifiers in internal HELM databases and can be represented by the identifier in strings (similar to SMILES or InChI).

The classical Java based HELM Editor by Pistoia was integrated with several BIOVIA applications already many years ago. It is based on a monomer library that is locally installed. Meanwhile a newer Javascript version exists.

With Pipette BioSketcher a new state-of-the-art HELM editor exists from BIOVIA. Pipette supports small molecules, reactions and HELM sequences. It is an intuitive sequence builder with well defined attachment points and is available with BIOVIA Registration, Insight, Pipeline Pilot, Draw, ScienceCloud  and on the 3DExperience Platform.

HELM is supported across the BIOVIA ecosystem:

Pipeline Pilot/ PPChem SDK:

• HELM components
• Pipette BioSketcher
• HELM Editor integration
• HELM Monomer Libraries
• XHELM

BIOVIA Draw:

• Import and Export of HELM Strings
• Pipette BioSketcher
• HELM Editor integration
• HELM Monomer Libraries
• XHELM

Direct Chemistry Cartridge:

• Registration, import and export HELM and XHELM

• Register HELM strings as entities (conversion to SCSR)
• Pipette BioSketcher