The Physics

Why cancer light
looks different.

Ultra-weak photon emissions (UPEs) are a byproduct of oxidative metabolism — the chemical reactions that power every cell. They are real, measurable, and carry information about the cell's internal state. Healthy cells produce a characteristic emission profile. Cancer cells do not.

The difference lies in the spectral shape, not brightness. Malignant cells emit photons at shifted wavelengths, with a frequency signature around ~20Hz that does not appear in healthy tissue. This signature was discovered by Dr. Nirosha Murugan across a decade of peer-reviewed research.

LuminAI applies spectral power density (SPD) analysis to extract this fingerprint from raw photon data. The result is a biomarker classification — malignant or not — grounded in physics, not symptoms, imaging, or blood chemistry.

Detection Threshold

What "early" actually means.

A tumor at 5-10 million cells is about 2 millimeters across. Too small to feel. Invisible on a scan. By the time it reaches 1 billion cells, roughly a centimeter, medicine can finally see it. That growth took 1.5 to 2 years. HelioFlux is built to find it first.

Our Pilot

Starting with skin.

Every year, millions of patients leave a dermatologist's office with an unanswered question: is this mole dangerous? The doctor has two options. Cut it out and send it to a lab, or say "let's watch it." Most biopsies come back benign. The ones that don't sometimes come back too late.

HelioFlux gives clinicians a third option. A 15-minute scan reads the photon signature of a suspicious lesion and returns a result in the office. No cutting. No waiting. No guessing.

Skin is where we start because the clinical pathway is clear: the dermatologist already has the patient, already suspects something, and already faces a binary decision. HelioFlux plugs into that moment without changing the workflow.

Once we validate the technology on melanoma, the same platform expands. Brain cancer. Breast cancer. Eventually, a full-body scan that reads every tissue type at once.

Preclinical Evidence

It worked in mice first.

In 2020, Dr. Murugan's lab published results from 47 live animal models injected with melanoma cells. Whole-body photon emissions detected the cancer within 24 hours of injection — 18 days before tumors were physically detectable. Final discriminant accuracy: 90%.

This is the in vivo foundation for HelioFlux's human skin pilot. Same detection principle. Same spectral signature. Now built into a clinical-grade device.

For the Curious

Go deeper.

Published Research

Dr. Murugan's published work