Daniel A. Heller, PhD, CSO and Co-Founder of Nine Diagnostics, and co-founder Mijin Kim, PhD, co-authored “Industrial Adoption of Carbon Nanotubes,” a perspective published in Nano Letters on March 17, 2026. The paper was co-authored with Dana Goerzen (Cancer Nanomedicine Lab, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center) and Matteo Pasquali (Rice University), whose lab leads commercial-scale production of single-walled carbon nanotube fibers and materials.
The perspective surveys more than 30 years of carbon nanotube research and documents how manufacturing and processing advances have enabled substantial industrial adoption across energy storage, electronics, composite materials, and other sectors. The authors identify a critical knowledge gap: much of this commercial progress remains unknown within the academic research community. The paper also addresses EU regulatory proposals that would ban the entire class of carbon nanotube materials, arguing that an unmet need exists to define and differentiate individual nanotube types rather than apply a categorical prohibition to the material class.
The Nine Diagnostics platform uses semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) as its core sensing substrate. SWCNTs emit in the near-infrared spectrum, providing high-contrast optical signals in biological fluids with minimal background interference from tissue and blood components. Quantum-defect-modified carbon nanotube arrays, functionalized through distinct DNA-wrapping and surface engineering approaches, enable simultaneous multiplexed detection of thousands of molecular signals from a single blood draw, generating the proteomic, metabolomic, and lipidomic fingerprints that power Nine Diagnostics’ cancer diagnostic platform.
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. Read the paper.
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.