A passion for healthcare, for over a decade

Meet Kenneth Chahine, Ph.D., J.D., Founding CEO

Ken is a serial consumer healthcare entrepreneur with a passion for unlocking opportunities in underserved markets facing massive and inefficient consumer pain points. His superpower is his ability to combine his science, law and consumer experiences to develop strategies that deliver an exceptional service to the masses without compromising on the science.

Before founding Nectar, Ken was the EVP and founding executive of AncestryDNA and Ancestry Health, a consumer genealogy and disease risk predisposition testing company. While at AncestryDNA he took DNA testing mainstream and grew the total addressable market from a niche $10M to well over $2B by reinventing the end-to-end consumer experience. During his tenure, he grew the DNA business to over $500M in direct sales, while driving 20% cross sell into the Ancestry subscription business, led the team through hyper-growth, and scaled global operations to over 10M genomic tests annually.

Ken has demonstrated a talent for identifying winning products. Earlier in his career, Ken was the CEO of Helio Health, a company focused on early cancer detection from a simple blood spot, currently in late-stage FDA trials. He was also the CEO of Avigen, a gene therapy company focused on developing cures for monogenic disease. Avigen’s cure for hemophilia and treatment for Parkinson’s Disease were both recently approved in the EU and are on track for approval in the U.S.