Daniel A. Heller, PhD, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of Nine Diagnostics and Head of the Cancer Nanomedicine Laboratory at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, has been named one of 16 grant recipients selected by The Gray Foundation as part of its Team Science program.
The Gray Foundation announced a three-year, $35 million investment to advance innovative approaches to the prevention, early detection, and interception of BRCA-associated cancers. Recipients were selected from more than 85 applications through an extensive evaluation led by the Foundation’s Chief Science Advisor. This latest funding brings total BRCA-related philanthropic support from Mindy and Jon Gray to more than $235 million.
Dr. Heller’s research focuses on developing nanosensor technologies that detect disease at the earliest stages using blood-based molecular signals and artificial intelligence. This work forms the scientific foundation underlying Nine Diagnostics’ multi-omic platform.
The Gray Foundation’s Team Science program prioritizes collaborative, multi-disciplinary research teams working on the most urgent questions in BRCA-related cancer biology. Dr. Heller’s selection reflects continued external validation of nanosensor-based approaches to cancer early detection.
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.