Business Black Box

Imagine a mouse. Not the whole
mouse. Just the mouse’s brain.
Imagine that that mouse
is sick. Maybe there is a spot
that could be a tumor. Maybe
something is misfiring. You don’t
know, but you want to find out.
Now, imagine that in 100 hours
or less, you could have a digital map
of every neuron in that sample. Such
a technology could, very simply put,
revolutionize our abilities in drug discoveries
and medical devices.
That technology is not far off— in fact,
3Scan’s technology can do just that. Using
knife-edge scanning (or KESM), it can create
3D models of tissue samples.
Different diseases have different scales,
explains founder Todd Huffman. For some,
like cancer (especially cancers that form
tumors), the diseases start at a tissue level.
Through pathology, you might take a chunk
of tissue, then manually dissect it to examine
thin layers under a microscope—a very slow
and tedious process.
But all that changes with 3Scan’s technology.
“What we’ve done is applied automation
and robotics to the process of microscopically
examining tissue,” explains 3Scan’s founder
Todd Huffman. “Instead of having a human
manually moving around very small pieces
of tissue and then looking at them under
a microscope, we put the tissue into our
robotic system, and it automatically slices
and images the tissue. It then makes a
digital representation of it, and then you
can either visualize or run analytics over the
3-dimensional reconstruction.”
The potential rings clear for neuroscience
and histology, but 3Scan’s technology can
also be used in areas like composite materials
science, where one might need to examine
flaws in carbon fiber composites.
For more from Business Black Box visit insideblackbox.com
Q4 2013 // Business Black Box
65