Nine Diagnostics has been selected for the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Innovative Ventures in Early-Stage Technologies (InVEST) program, which provides direct seed investment to early-stage companies founded by Damon Runyon alumni scientists. Nine Diagnostics was approved for participation in June 2026.
The InVEST program was established to advance Damon Runyon’s mission of accelerating breakthroughs in cancer treatment, diagnosis, and prevention by backing companies founded by its scientists at the fundraising stage, when support is most critical. The program provides a $50,000 investment structured as a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) to eligible companies actively raising seed or Series A rounds. All equity from these investments is returned to Damon Runyon’s research budget to support the next generation of exceptional young cancer researchers through the Foundation’s established award programs.
Daniel A. Heller, PhD, co-founder and CSO of Nine Diagnostics and Head of the Cancer Nanomedicine Lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, completed a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT in 2012. As a Damon Runyon alumnus and scientific co-founder of Nine Diagnostics, Dr. Heller established the company’s eligibility for InVEST, which is limited to companies whose scientific founders hold current or former Damon Runyon awards.
For Nine Diagnostics, the InVEST investment represents validation from one of the most respected institutions in cancer research, and direct capital from an organization whose alumni have generated some of the most impactful advances in oncology over the past generation. Damon Runyon’s decision to support Nine Diagnostics also reflects the scientific lineage at the core of the company’s platform: the nanosensor and machine learning approach underlying the Nine Diagnostics technology developed across the years of work following Dr. Heller’s Damon Runyon fellowship, through research that ultimately produced peer-reviewed clinical validation in brain tumors and ovarian cancer.
Nine Diagnostics’ AI-enabled nanosensor platform is built on published peer-reviewed validation. In Nature Nanotechnology (Goerzen et al., 2026), the platform demonstrated 98% accuracy in brain tumor detection and 71% accuracy in tumor type identification across 739 patient samples at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Northwestern University, and NYU, representing the first multi-site clinical validation of the approach. In Nature Biomedical Engineering (Kim et al., 2022), the platform demonstrated 87% sensitivity and 98% specificity for high-grade serous ovarian cancer detection across 269 patient samples.
This work forms the scientific foundation of Nine Diagnostics, co-founded in 2024 by Freddy T. Nguyen, MD, PhD, Daniel A. Heller, PhD, and Mijin Kim, 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.