“We’re developing a liquid biopsy that uses nano sensors and AI in order to make treatment decisions and detect cancers early.”
Daniel A. Heller, PhD
Ovarian cancer is the deadliest gynecologic malignancy in the United States, in large part because most diagnoses occur at advanced stages when the disease has spread beyond the ovary. The absence of a reliable early detection tool remains one of the central unmet needs in oncology. Dr. Heller’s lab is developing a liquid biopsy that uses carbon nanotube nanosensor arrays to generate a multi-molecular fingerprint from blood, enabling detection without reliance on individual predefined biomarkers.
The nanosensor technology featured in the KVIA-TV segment builds on work published in Nature Biomedical Engineering (Kim et al., 2022), which demonstrated 87% sensitivity and 98% specificity for high-grade serous ovarian cancer detection from serum in a cohort of 269 patients using quantum-defect-modified carbon nanotube arrays and machine learning.
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.
