Mehdi Hatamian honored with ECE Alumni Impact Award

Mehdi Hatamian (MSE PhD EE ‘78 ‘82) envisions a future where everyone can do a monthly at-home screening for multiple cancers, including the four most common cancers in the world. His company, 2Pi-Sigma Corporation, is developing a $50 rapid home-test that uses the same technology as the familiar COVID-19 rapid tests most of us have used.

For this important work, as well as his past accomplishments, Mehdi Hatamian received the 2024 Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Impact Award. This award is the highest recognition granted by ECE to its alumni. In 2008, he received the ECE Alumni Merit Award. 

In his award lecture, “Cancer Screening For All – An Electrical Engineer’s Approach,” he talked about the inspiration for this project and his process in developing it.

Hatamian had a unique approach to his presentation, joking, “The good news is that I have 300 slides. The better news is that I’m not going to use them. I have never prepared for a talk, except for my thesis defense here at U of M, because when I prepare, I always screw it up. So I just do it on the fly.”

In lieu of a prepared and timed slide presentation, Hatamian addressed the lecture attendees in a conversational manner, encouraging critical and difficult questions. Over the course of his career, he worked at NASA, Bell Labs, Silicon Design Experts Inc., and Broadcom, where he became the Chief Scientist of Central Engineering. He is an IEEE Life Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

While Hatamian’s career in integrated circuit design and signal processing was taking off, he was also nurturing a passion to learn about and try to prevent cancer.

Hatamian’s interest in cancer biology was sparked by personal tragedy: he lost both his sister and his father to cancer. He also saw how early detection saved another sister’s life, allowing her to survive cancer twice and live cancer-free today. He began investing in cancer companies, started learning from biologists and biochemists, and ultimately, decided that he would leave his job at Broadcom to develop technology for early cancer detection.

“Everyone thought I was crazy—I had the dream job at what is now a near trillion-dollar company and I quit to follow this passion. But I thought I owed it to myself to try this; otherwise, I would be sorry. And I couldn’t be any happier about that decision today,” Hatamian said.

He founded 2Pi-Sigma Corporation with his own funds because he wanted to have evidence that his ambitious goal had potential for an effective, reliable, and affordable screening technology.

“The goal that was set from the very first day the company was created was a $50 cancer screening cartridge, a home test that you can do every month from a fingerstick to monitor yourself for the onset of cancer as early as possible,” Hatamian said, “This is a nearly impossible goal. For that reason, I didn’t look for investors for the first five years. I did not want them to have doubts.”

Building this trust with investors has been especially important—and especially difficult—for 2Pi-Sigma Corporation due to the highly publicized rise and fall of the biomedical company Theranos from 2003–2018. Hatamian has been extremely careful in the way that he talks about his product, its development, and its potential. The company has been operating in “stealth mode” since its founding in 2016, without even a website landing page to advertise the product.

2Pi-Sigma Corporation started its screening with the four most common cancers—lung, breast, prostate, and colon—because they make up over 50% of cancer cases worldwide and early diagnosis greatly improves the outcomes for patients with these cancers. Their current assay, run in the laboratory, correctly identifies 92.2% of positive cases and 95.6% of negative cases.

“For these cancers, these numbers are actually great, and we’re trying to make them even better,” Hatamian said. “If we can really achieve this in a cartridge, I think it’ll be phenomenal.”

Hatamian’s research has demonstrated the test’s promise in detecting cancer at any stage, from I–IV, in humans. At the first sign of a positive result, a patient would need to pursue further testing at a hospital or clinic to diagnose the type of cancer and assess treatment options.

The project will be collecting data for a couple more years before they hope to get their cartridge test into FDA trials. So far, it has resulted in an IP portfolio of 58 patents. In the meantime, Hatamian stays connected to his electrical engineering roots by building signal processing systems and designing phased array antenna circuits for 5 and 6 GHz bands.

“That’s kind of like a little hobby,” he said. “I try not to stay away from the circuit stuff, since that is one of the elements of my happiness.”