Nine Diagnostics was selected to participate in the NSF I-Corps Program at MIT, with the team’s participation beginning July 17, 2024. The program is administered through the New England Regional Innovation Node at MIT and provides structured customer discovery training for research-based startup teams, equipping scientific founders with the framework to rigorously test whether a technology addresses a genuine and commercially viable market need.
The National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps) was established in 2011 to reduce the time and risk associated with translating federally funded research discoveries into commercially viable products and services. The program operates through a national network of university-based regional nodes, with the MIT node serving as one of the founding sites. Participating teams follow a structured curriculum, completing a minimum of 100 customer discovery interviews to test hypotheses about target market, customer segments, value propositions, and deployment channels. The program is equity-free and provides teams with NSF funding alongside access to a national network of mentors, coaches, and program alumni.
The Nine Diagnostics team included Freddy T. Nguyen, MD, PhD as Entrepreneurial Lead, alongside Stanislav Piletsky, PhD and Sam Riegel. The core focus of the team’s customer discovery work was the on-treatment monitoring use case: understanding how oncologists, pathologists, diagnostic laboratory directors, and biopharma clinical development teams think about treatment response assessment today, where the unmet needs are most acute, and which clinical and commercial pathways are most viable for a nanosensor-based platform. The team completed structured interviews spanning academic medical centers, community oncology practices, laboratory directors, and biopharma clinical operations teams across the United States and international markets.
The structured customer discovery discipline of I-Corps provided an early-stage commercial foundation at a critical juncture for Nine Diagnostics. The interviews validated the team’s core hypothesis that the most acute unmet need was in on-treatment monitoring, specifically in closing the treatment feedback loop to help clinicians determine whether a therapy was working, rather than in screening or early-stage detection approaches. This finding sharpened the company’s strategic direction, establishing on-treatment monitoring as the primary commercial focus and laying the groundwork for subsequent indication selection and clinical partnership development. The program ran through August 7, 2024, with a final cohort closing workshop before the team transitioned into the next set of accelerator engagements that fall.
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.
About NSF I-Corps
The National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps) is a program that prepares scientists and engineers to translate discoveries into innovations with commercial and societal impact. Established in 2011, I-Corps centers on an intensive customer discovery process designed to help research teams understand whether and how their technologies can meet real-world needs. The program operates through a national network of university-based nodes and hubs and has supported thousands of teams across the United States. The New England Regional Innovation Node is hosted at MIT.