In February 2024, NBC New York (WNBC-TV 4) featured research from the Cancer Nanomedicine Lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on the development of an AI-enabled nanosensor blood test for earlier ovarian cancer detection. Reporter Erica Byfield covered the story, “Developing a New Tool Using A.I. and Nanotech to Detect Ovarian Cancer,” highlighting a platform that combines carbon nanotube nanosensors, lasers, and machine learning to analyze blood samples for cancer signatures.
The research was supported in part by a $900,000 grant from the Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance (OCRA) over three years, funding the Heller Lab’s efforts to develop a blood-based diagnostic capable of identifying high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma at earlier stages than current screening approaches permit. The segment featured Daniel A. Heller, PhD, who described the core aim of the work: if the test’s results hold up in expanded studies, “then we know, wow, we have something that could potentially tell us whether blood from a patient is cancer or normal.”
Ovarian cancer is the deadliest gynecological malignancy in the United States, largely because most cases are diagnosed at advanced stages when treatment is substantially less effective. The nanosensor approach covered in the NBC New York segment draws on the same quantum-defect-modified carbon nanotube array architecture validated in the lab’s 2022 publication in Nature Biomedical Engineering, which demonstrated 87% sensitivity and 98% specificity for high-grade serous ovarian cancer detection from serum across a cohort of 269 patients.
The nanosensor technology developed at MSKCC during this period forms the scientific foundation of Nine Diagnostics, co-founded in 2024 by Daniel A. Heller, PhD, Mijin Kim, PhD, and Freddy T. Nguyen, MD, PhD. Watch the segment at NBC New York.
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.