Freddy T. Nguyen, MD, PhD, CEO and Co-Founder of Nine Diagnostics, joined the KAMI Think Tank podcast From Models to Medicine for Episode 8, titled “The Equity Gap in Diagnostic AI,” on May 13, 2026. The episode is a candid, technically grounded conversation on what equitable AI in medicine actually requires, produced for life sciences professionals working at the intersection of AI and clinical care.
Drawing on a background spanning medicine, pathology, optics, and nanotechnology, Dr. Nguyen discusses how Nine Diagnostics is building a multiomics platform designed to tell cancer patients within days whether their treatment is actually working. The episode examines AI’s power in connecting siloed data across molecular readouts, imaging, and clinical context, and why treating patients as more than just their diagnosis is the only foundation on which tools that hold up in clinical practice can be built.
Despite the growth of AI tools in clinical workflows, a persistent gap remains between model performance in controlled research settings and real-world implementation across diverse patient populations. Diagnostic AI built on non-representative datasets carries equity implications that extend beyond technical performance metrics. The episode examines these dynamics directly, including where AI in clinical workflows breaks down and what a more equitable standard for diagnostic AI development would look like in practice.
The platform builds on published peer-reviewed evidence. Kim et al. (2022) in Nature Biomedical Engineering demonstrated 87% sensitivity and 98% specificity for high-grade serous ovarian cancer detection across 269 patient samples, validating the multiomics fingerprinting approach in a clinical cohort without requiring predetermined biomarkers.
This work forms the scientific foundation of Nine Diagnostics, co-founded in 2024 by Daniel A. Heller, PhD (CSO, Head of the Cancer Nanomedicine Lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center), Mijin Kim, PhD, and Freddy T. Nguyen, MD, PhD. Listen to the episode.
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.