Medical devices & diagnostics · Molecular imaging
Bikanta
A Berkeley startup that licensed a fluorescent nanodiamond imaging platform out of the NIH, sold it as a research reagent, and ran out of money before it reached a patient. The founder dissolved the company and sent the intellectual property back.
A flashlight that does not burn out
A mouse lies under an imaging camera in a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute lab in Bethesda. A suspension of crushed diamond has gone into the animal’s footpad. The grains are small enough to slip into the lymphatic vessels and ride to the sentinel lymph node, the first node a cancer would reach if it were spreading. On the screen that node glows. In a conventional image it is not there at all.
That experiment, published in Biomedical Optics Express on April 1, 2014, is the company in one frame. The paper reports that the technique “improves the signal-to-background ratio for in vivo imaging up to 100-fold.”
Ambika Bumb, who did the work as an NIH postdoc, described it to a reporter this way: “It’s like having a flashlight inside your body that basically lasts forever.”
The problem the diamonds were aimed at
Optical imaging agents fail in two directions. Organic dyes fade under the laser that excites them. Quantum dots are bright but built from toxic cores. Both compete with tissue that glows on its own, and that background hides the small things: a tumor still forming, a few cells that have broken away.
A nitrogen atom sitting beside a hole in the carbon lattice makes a color center that emits near infrared light and does not bleach or blink. The second trick is what made a company plausible. Nanodiamond fluorescence responds to a magnetic field, so a weak field of roughly 100 gauss switched on and off during imaging modulates the diamond signal while leaving tissue background alone. Subtract one frame from the other and the background drops out, on ordinary optical hardware.
Getting there took a second invention. Raw nanodiamonds clump and resist chemistry. In a 2013 paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Bumb and colleagues wrapped each particle in silica inside a liposome, leaving a surface antibodies could be linked to.
The founder
Bumb took a biomedical engineering degree at Georgia Tech, then a doctorate at Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship through the NIH Oxford program, done in three years. Two postdoctoral fellowships followed, at the National Cancer Institute and then at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, where the nanodiamond work happened. “The nanodiamond technology was developed during my last post-doc,” she told Y Combinator in 2015. The plan had been a faculty job; an NIH award for technical achievement changed it. In 2015 the NHLBI gave its Orloff Technical Achievement Award to the original team, Keir Neuman, Susanta Sarkar and Bumb.
The Molecular Foundry years
Bikanta went through Y Combinator in the summer of 2014 and pitched at Demo Day on August 19 at the Computer History Museum, alongside Ginkgo Bioworks and Checkr. TechCrunch summarized it in two lines: nanodiamonds as miniature flashlights, a $12 billion market.
The NIH licensing notice had run in the Federal Register two months earlier. It named Bikanta Corporation, a Delaware corporation then at 6694 Cedar Boulevard in Newark, California, and described an exclusive worldwide license to two inventions: a method for preparing silica coated nanodiamonds, and background free imaging by magnetic modulation. The field of use was narrow. Imaging devices and systems, plus probe sales for non-clinical uses, for a term not to exceed five years.
The company found a home it could afford: by 2015 it was working out of the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a Department of Energy user facility. It shipped product, too. An archived 2017 catalog lists fourteen items, fluorescent nanodiamonds at 40 and 100 nanometers with five surface chemistries. Instruments were still prototypes: microscopes, gel scanners, animal imagers, a handheld device.
Recognition arrived on schedule: a 2014 Silicon Valley Boomer Venture Summit win, a FAST award from the California Life Sciences Institute, and one of four nominations for Diagnostics Startup of the Year at the 2015 QB3 awards.
What happened
The company got to the edge of the clinic and stopped. Bumb told a podcast interviewer in March 2021 what the wall was: “And when Theranos blew up, it was a diagnostic company. Investors got spooked and then raising money in a diagnostic space became very, very challenging.” She tried repositioning the pitch toward imaging. It did not close the round.
“So in the end we ended up transferring the technology, the IP back to the NIH. And I had to decide to dissolve the company because of the timing,” she said. By her count the company lasted five and a half years.
Bumb went into government: a science and technology advisor role at the State Department from December 2019, then deputy executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, plus a stint as strategic advisor to the Energy Sciences Area at Berkeley Lab. Wikipedia lists her current post as deputy executive director at the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| NIH exclusive license | Federal Register notice, June 16, 2014, 79 FR 34323. Exclusive worldwide license contemplated to Bikanta Corporation for HHS Ref. E-175-2012/0 and E-261-2012. The United States is the assignee. Non-clinical probe sales, term not to exceed five years. | Public record |
| Peer reviewed papers | Three in PubMed: JACS, May 2013; Biomedical Optics Express, April 2014; Nanomedicine, April 2017, with an author listed at “Bikanta Inc., Molecular Foundry, Berkeley, CA, USA.” | Public record |
| The 100-fold claim | Traceable to the 2014 paper and to mouse imaging, not human data. The company repeated it without that qualifier. | Claim outruns the record |
| Clinical trials and FDA | No registered trial. No 510(k) clearance and no premarket approval. | Not found |
| Federal grants | No award in NIH RePORTER, none in the NSF database. No SBIR of any phase. | Not found |
| Patents | The company posted on September 20, 2016 that the USPTO had approved its patent for imaging processing methods. NIH tech transfer lists a patent of that title under E-261-2012, application 61/711,702, status abandoned. CB Insights lists one Bikanta patent, filed April 8, 2016, granted April 21, 2020. No patent number appears anywhere. | Records disagree |
| Products sold | Fourteen reagent SKUs in a 2017 catalog, pricing by inquiry. No customer, volume or revenue figure found. | Company-stated |
| Company status | The founder says the IP went back to NIH and the company was dissolved after about five and a half years. CB Insights records “Bikanta ceased operations.” The bikanta.com domain resolves but does not answer. | Public record |
Read plainly: the physics held up and was published in credible journals before the company existed. The unproven part was never the nanodiamond. It was whether a small team could carry a federally owned invention through the years and the capital a clinical claim costs, in a category where the money dried up for reasons that had nothing to do with diamonds.
What to watch
- Whether NIH relicenses E-175-2012 and E-261-2012. The inventions went back to a federal owner that can grant them again.
- Whether magnetically modulated background free imaging shows up in anyone else’s clinical program. Bumb said in 2021 that about six companies were doing nanodiamond work and that trials had started outside cancer.
- Whether the 2017 immune cell paper gets followed up. It reported uptake of nanodiamonds by natural killer cells and monocytes without loss of viability, which points at cell tracking.
In their words
“It’s like having a flashlight inside your body that basically lasts forever.”
Ambika Bumb, founder and CEO, TechCrunch, 2014 · Independent
“The National Institutes of Health has licensed the technology to Bikanta, and I owe much of what I know to the training I received from the NIH.”
Ambika Bumb, International Business Times UK, 2014 · Independent
“today my company is accessing the majority of its instrumentation through the Molecular Foundry, a Department of Energy (DOE) funded user facility”
Ambika Bumb, bylined column in TechCrunch, December 2015 · Company-stated
“And when Theranos blew up, it was a diagnostic company. Investors got spooked and then raising money in a diagnostic space became very, very challenging.”
Ambika Bumb, The Bioinformatics CRO Podcast, March 2021 · Interview
“So in the end we ended up transferring the technology, the IP back to the NIH. And I had to decide to dissolve the company because of the timing.”
Ambika Bumb, The Bioinformatics CRO Podcast, March 2021 · Interview
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordProspective Grant of Exclusive License: Silica-Coated Fluorescent Nanodiamond Probes
- Public recordSilica encapsulation of fluorescent nanodiamonds
- Public recordWide-field in vivo background free imaging by magnetic modulation of nanodiamond fluorescence
- Public recordFluorescent nanodiamonds engage innate immune effector cells
- Public recordImaging Methods and Computer-Readable Media, E-261-2012-0-US-01
- Public recordNo Form D and no filing mentioning Bikanta
- Public recordNo award to Bikanta
- IndependentBikanta’s Tiny Diamonds Find Cancer Before It Spreads
- IndependentYC Demo Day Session 1
- IndependentMicroscopic Diamonds Are Lighting The Way to Early Cancer Detection
- InterviewFemale Founder Stories: Ambika Bumb, Founder of Bikanta
- InterviewEpisode 17 with Ambika Bumb
- IndependentAmbika Bumb
- DatabaseBikanta record: ceased operations, patent detail
- DatabaseBikanta company and funding record
- CompanyTechnology, products and about pages
- CompanyBlog posts on the patent and the Orloff Award
- CompanyA Nano Step For Man, A Giant Leap For Mankind
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
