The Scientist featured Nine Diagnostics CEO and co-founder Freddy T. Nguyen, MD, PhD, in a January 2026 article by Laura Tran, PhD, gathering researcher and entrepreneur perspectives on the National Science Foundation Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (NSF TIP)‘s new Tech Labs Initiative. The piece, titled “NSF Announces New Tech Labs Initiative, Researchers Respond,” examined how scientists and founders see the proposed program, which would fund multidisciplinary teams operating outside traditional academic institutions to accelerate the commercialization of emerging technologies.
Announced on December 12, 2025, the Tech Labs Initiative is designed to address what NSF TIP describes as the “valley of death” between laboratory proof-of-concept and successful commercialization. The initiative would support teams across topic areas including quantum technology, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology. Nguyen, who works at the intersection of translational research and healthcare startups, spoke to the need for a more concerted, coordinated push from the basic science side:
“If [we] really want to push this to commercialization, there has to be a much more concerted effort within the basic science [side].”
Freddy T. Nguyen, MD, PhD, quoted in The Scientist
Nguyen also emphasized the broader opportunity the initiative presents to engage stakeholders across academia, startups, and industry, pointing to new resources as a mechanism to attract talent to the field:
“We can certainly use more of those types of resources. It’s an opportunity to provide and leverage new resources beyond funding…[and hopefully] attract a new pool of researchers and scientists.”
Freddy T. Nguyen, MD, PhD, quoted in The Scientist
Nine Diagnostics’ AI-enabled nanosensor platform is built on peer-reviewed clinical 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 MSKCC, Northwestern, 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. Read the article in The Scientist.
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.