3Scan CEO Todd Huffman originally worked as a neuroinformatics researcher at Texas A&M in 2003 and first encountered the technology which became the core of 3Scan's microscopy services during this time. While the KESM was originally developed as a neuroimaging tool, 3Scan has taken the principles involved in this technology and expanded its use to create a novel type of histology and tissue imaging. The company has raised a total of $22 million through two rounds of equity funding from Lux Capital and Data Collective, joined by Dolby Family Ventures, OS Fund, Comet Labs, and Breakout Ventures. They have also raised $390,000 in non-dilutive grant money from institutions such as Breakout Labs and Start-Up Chile. The company employs about 35 full-time employees and generates revenue by providing its imaging services to pharmaceutical companies, labs, or pathologists involved in pre-clinical drug discovery. As of 2017, 3Scan is collaborating with pharmaceutical development scientists, academic researchers, and tissue engineers as a contract research organization. It is not currently used for clinical diagnostics, but is in the process of building out a platform to perform clinical pathology and diagnostic services. In 2018, cofounder Cody Daniel was named on the Forbes30 Under 30 list. In 2019, 3Scan became a part of Strateos.
Technology
3Scan’s technology changes the histology workflow to automate the process of tissue sectioning and imaging. Traditionally, histology slides are prepared by embedding a tissue sample in paraffin, taking some few slices of the tissue with a hand-driven microtome, mounting the tissue slices on slides, and staining with various histology stains. A pathologist then looks at these slides with a microscope. In the workflow developed by 3Scan, tissues are stained, embedded, and then sliced and imaged by the KESM. By automating this process, it becomes feasible to take slices of and image the entirety of tissue instead of a few representative slides. In addition to taking more sections, 3Scan’s proprietary software is able to computationally realign these sections in order to visualize the 3D structure of the tissue, similar in appearance to a CT scan. It uses machine vision to produce a 3D spatial map that researchers can analyze on a screen, similar to a topographical map of the Earth. Using these maps, scientists are also able to analyze parts of tissue and phenomena that were previously not visible, such as changes to blood flow between different tissue samples. This analysis is not possible using traditional manual histology techniques due to the excessive time involved and lost sections due to folding and warping. 3Scan’s KESM technology is able to perform approximately a year’s worth of tissue sample processing in a single day.
