He is teaching a probe the size of a pen to answer a question that usually takes a lab three days: is this tissue cancer?
Craig Davis. The banker who got tired of writing checks and picked up the scalpel instead.
Craig Davis runs NovaScan, a Chicago company betting that cancer has a tell. Not a shape you photograph or a stain you wait for, but an electrical signature - the way malignant tissue conducts a current differently than the healthy tissue beside it. Feed that signal to a machine-learning model and, the theory goes, a surgeon could know whether a margin is clean before the patient is even off the table. Davis has spent more than twenty years around medical devices. This is the one he decided to build himself.
We see NovaScan as a company that can transform the treatment of skin cancer - the most common cancer in the world - but also as one that can improve the detection and treatment of many types of cancers.
- Craig Davis, President & CEO, NovaScan
Most people meet cancer diagnostics as a waiting game. A biopsy goes out, a pathology report comes back, and days evaporate while a patient sits with a question mark. Davis's whole pitch is an argument against that wait. NovaScan's platform reads bioimpedance - the electrical resistance of tissue - and pairs it with machine learning to sort healthy from malignant in real time, at a fraction of the cost of the imaging and lab work it hopes to supplement.
The company gave its tools names with personality. MarginScan is aimed at skin excisions, checking in the moment whether a surgeon got all of the cancer or needs to cut again. nsCanary is the broader platform - the canary in the coal mine, listening for trouble across lung, breast, gastrointestinal and pancreatic tissue. Underneath sits a bit of borrowed physics with a jazz-record name: the Cole relaxation frequency, a measure of how cells respond to an electrical field.
Davis did not arrive here as a lab scientist. He arrived as a money guy who kept getting closer to the product. He was a partner at LaSalle Investments, a small shop that helped co-found Merge Healthcare - a medical imaging company that went public and was eventually acquired by IBM for around a billion dollars - and OrthoScan, later bought by Germany's ATON GmbH. He sat on a GTCR-backed team rolling up urology devices. He was a partner at Healthios, a healthcare investment bank founded by former Baxter chief Vern Loucks. He helped shape New Aera, a respiratory company later acquired by Inogen.
That is a resume full of exits, the kind of track record that lets a person keep advising and investing comfortably from a distance. Davis went the other direction. At NovaScan he stopped underwriting other founders' bets and made his own, taking the CEO seat of a clinical-stage company where the science is hard, the trials are slow, and the payoff is years out. He has raised over $20 million, landed a CPRIT grant out of Texas, stitched together strategic partnerships, and pushed the platform into multiple human trials.
His training helps explain the leap. Davis holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, an MS in Engineering from Northwestern, and an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School. Engineer first, financier second - so a company built on the electrical behavior of tissue is not a detour for him. It is the whole point.
In 2022, Wisconsin's WiSys named Davis and NovaScan founder Dr. William Gregory its Carl E. Gulbrandsen Innovators of the Year - a nod to the university-research roots underneath the Chicago startup. In 2024 he took the story to a bigger stage, presenting NovaScan's ex vivo and in vivo detection work at the LSI USA Emerging Medtech Summit, one of the field's marquee gatherings.
A low-cost, single-use probe sends a tiny electrical current into tissue - ex vivo on a removed sample, or in vivo in the body.
Cancer cells conduct differently than healthy ones. The device captures that bioimpedance signature - the "electrical mammogram."
Machine learning reads the signal and flags likely malignancy in real time, aiming for a verdict in seconds instead of days.
Financed a clinical-stage oncology company through multiple trials, plus a CPRIT grant out of Texas.
Drove development of an AI and bioimpedance platform for rapid intraoperative cancer assessment.
Named Carl E. Gulbrandsen Innovator of the Year for translating university research into a company.
Helped co-found Merge Healthcare - an IPO later acquired by IBM for roughly $1 billion.
Advancing trials across skin, lung, breast, GI and pancreatic tissue on a single detection platform.
Presented NovaScan's ex vivo and in vivo detection work at a marquee medtech summit.