Freddy T. Nguyen, MD, PhD, CEO and Co-Founder of Nine Diagnostics, appeared on Episode 40 of the Pitt HexAI Podcast, produced by the Health and Explainable AI Research Lab at the University of Pittsburgh, on May 14, 2026. The episode, titled “Innovating Precision Medicine with Dr. Freddy Nguyen,” examines the entrepreneurship pathway behind Nine Diagnostics and the AI-enabled nanosensor platform the company is building to transform how cancer treatment decisions are made.
Nine Diagnostics is developing a multiomics platform that generates molecular fingerprints from a single blood draw, capturing proteomic, metabolomic, and lipidomic signals simultaneously across thousands of molecular features. Dr. Nguyen traces his path through MIT Hacking Medicine and the MIT Catalyst Scholars Program, describing how those experiences shaped a patient-first and science-first approach to building tools that reach patients rather than staying confined to the lab. Central to the episode is the shift from static genomic profiling toward what Dr. Nguyen describes as functional precision medicine: a real-time view of what is happening inside a patient’s body that supports faster, more individualized treatment decisions.
A persistent gap in current cancer care is the lag between starting a therapy and knowing whether it is working. Most patients lack reliable tools to identify who is likely to respond before treatment begins, and feedback during treatment often arrives too late to change course meaningfully. The episode also addresses a core tension in clinical AI: more data is not automatically better. Explainable AI must close the loop between model outputs and the underlying biology, identifying which signals actually matter for a given clinical decision rather than simply optimizing on scale.
The platform builds on published peer-reviewed evidence. Goerzen et al. (2026) in Nature Nanotechnology demonstrated 98% accuracy in brain tumor detection and 71% accuracy in tumor type identification across 739 patients at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Northwestern, and NYU, representing the first multi-site clinical validation of the machine perception liquid biopsy approach.
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. Watch the episode on YouTube.
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.