NVision raises $38 million led by health diagnostics giant Abbott to scale up its groundbreaking cancer imaging system. Next up: using its quantum technology to design new drugs.

On a sunny Tuesday in late March at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, Kayvan Keshari pulls up images of a patient’s prostate tumor on his computer. This is no traditional MRI scan. Instead, it looks more like a weather map that shows how the tumor is changing, with areas of serious disease glowing red and ominous black.

“The areas that are black are what will kill you. The green is indolent and people will even argue, ‘This is not a cancer you should treat,’” says Keshari, a researcher who focuses on cancer metabolism and has worked to bring this new imaging technology to MSK. “We can’t just understand one tumor or one blood sample. We have to understand the tumor’s ecosystem, and you can’t do that without imaging.”

The problem is that standard MRIs only show broad outlines of the disease. And even PET scans, which rely on radioactive tracers, show how a tumor has grown but not the full biological activity happening inside it.

Enter NVision Quantum Technologies. The 11-year-old, Ulm, Germany-based company has developed a new way to image cancer cells by taking advantage of the fact that they process sugar differently from healthy cells. Their quantum-based technology can boost the signal sugars emit by more than 10,000 times, which enables a standard MRI machine to measure how a tumor’s cells are changing in real time.

That will allow oncologists and the cancer patients they’re treating to get feedback on whether a therapy is working in days instead of months. It is currently only for research, but a commercial version could be life-changing for patients who have limited time to find the right treatment before their cancer progresses.

“We know that metabolism is........

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