Mijin Kim, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the Heller Lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), has been named a 2023 STAT Wunderkind by STAT News, the health and medicine publication. The annual honor recognizes 28 early-career researchers in North America whose work promises to reshape the life sciences.
Kim’s scientific path began in physical chemistry, where her doctoral research explored the properties of single-walled carbon nanotubes. She found that these nanoscale materials could be modified to fluoresce differently in response to specific molecules, creating the basis for a new class of sensors. In a paragraph at the end of her PhD thesis, she noted the potential for biomedical applications, a direction that would define the next phase of her career.
“I decided to make a drastic transition from fundamental physical chemistry to biomedical engineering work to apply this new nanomaterial for cancer diagnosis and research.”
Mijin Kim, PhD
As a postdoctoral researcher in the Heller Lab at MSKCC, Kim applied her nanotube innovations to ovarian cancer detection. Ovarian tumors are difficult to identify from blood alone because established biomarkers for the disease can also arise from benign conditions. Kim developed arrays of carbon nanotubes functionalized with quantum defects that respond to a milieu of proteins and metabolites in blood, generating complex fluorescent patterns. By applying machine learning to these patterns, her team identified nanotube configurations capable of distinguishing ovarian cancer from other conditions. The work was published as Kim et al. (2022) in Nature Biomedical Engineering, achieving 87% sensitivity and 98% specificity for high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma across 269 serum samples.
With further refinement, the technology holds potential as an early detection tool for other hard-to-screen cancers including pancreatic and gastrointestinal malignancies, where earlier intervention could significantly improve patient outcomes. Kim is joining Georgia Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor, where she will continue her research program in nanosensor-based cancer diagnostics.
The nanosensor platform developed during Kim’s postdoctoral fellowship at MSKCC forms the scientific foundation of Nine Diagnostics, which she co-founded in 2024 alongside Freddy T. Nguyen, MD, PhD and Daniel A. Heller, PhD.
About Nine Diagnostics
Nine Diagnostics is an AI-enabled multi-omic nanosensor company advancing precision medicine. The platform simultaneously captures proteomic, metabolomic, and lipidomic signals alongside patient clinical context to generate a multi-omic fingerprint, using machine learning to identify disease-relevant patterns without requiring prior knowledge of which biomarkers matter. This enables pre-treatment patient stratification, on-treatment response monitoring, and post-treatment minimal residual disease detection. Founded by Freddy T. Nguyen, MD, PhD (CEO), Daniel A. Heller, PhD (CSO), and Mijin Kim, PhD (Scientific Advisor), Nine Diagnostics is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.