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3DT Holdings, home

We makethe bodymeasurable.

A San Diego laboratory where cardiovascular and metabolic devices are invented, proven in large animals, and built into companies. Eleven engineers, clinicians and technicians. One building. Bench to first-in-human without a vendor contract.

See the programsContract research

San Diego, California

Est. 2007

200+

Issued and pending patents

Conductance, retroperfusion, pericardial access, magnetic occlusion

5

Portfolio companies

Each built on a platform proven in the laboratory downstairs

300+

Full-length publications

From the founder's laboratory, 373 of them indexed in PubMed

2025

First FDA clearance

Fecobionics Anorectal System, K242666, cleared February 2025

Everything here descends
from one measurement.

Nearly everything here descends from one measurement. Pass a small current between two electrodes inside a vessel and the tissue answers. The answer is geometry: the exact cross-section of the lumen you are standing in, live, without contrast and without guesswork.

Drag along the vessel to move the catheter. Arrow keys work too.

Measured lumenReference caliberMinimum lumen area
PROXIMALDISTAL

Lumen area

7.65mm²

Diameter

3.12mm

Conductance

5.35mS

Area stenosis

0%

01

Inject

Two excitation electrodes on the catheter shaft drive a low-amplitude alternating current, tens of microamps at tens of kilohertz, through blood and vessel wall.

02

Sense

Two detection electrodes sit a millimeter apart between them and read the voltage that survives. Current divided by voltage is conductance, and conductance scales with the area the current had to cross.

03

Separate

Some of that current leaks into the wall and the tissue beyond it. Two injections at different saline concentrations cancel the leak and leave the lumen alone. It is a novel approach to a correction the field has used since the 1980s, and it is what makes the number trustworthy.

04

Act

The interventionalist now sizes a stent, a valve annulus or a balloon against a measured area rather than an estimate read off a shadow.

Four problems, each
measured before it is treated.

Every program starts with a quantity a clinician cannot currently see, and ends with a device that reports it during the procedure rather than after it.

Immunofluorescence cross-section of a coronary artery showing concentric media and elastic lamina
Plate 01
Interventional cardiologyProgram 01

Conductance Balloon Post-Dilatation Catheter

A stent that is not opened to the size of the artery around it is the strongest predictor of restenosis there is. Underexpansion is a different failure from malapposition, and it is the one that matters most, yet the operator cannot see it on angiography, because angiography images the contrast column rather than the stent.

~50%of stented lesions fall short of the conventional expansion threshold. Median expansion across the 2,128 core-lab-read cases in ILUMIEN IV was 79.1% of the average reference lumen area

Cardiac muscle at high magnification with sarcomere striations and packed mitochondria
Plate 02
Structural heartProgram 02

Stabilization Device for Trans-septal Access

Crossing from the right atrium to the left means pushing a needle through the septum on a beating, moving wall. The puncture site wanders. Every structural procedure that follows, atrial fibrillation ablation, septal defect repair, mitral valve repair, appendage closure, inherits that instability.

Fluorescent tracer perfusing a branching microvascular capillary bed
Plate 03
Acute myocardial infarctionProgram 03

Mild Hypothermia Catheter for Reperfusion Injury

Opening a blocked coronary artery saves the patient and injures the muscle. Restoring flow to starved tissue triggers a second wave of cell death, and cooling the myocardium blunts it. Cooling the whole patient to get there causes shivering, arrhythmia and delay.

~250,000Americans present with ST-elevation myocardial infarction each year, between a quarter and a third of all heart attacks

Visualization of an electrical conductance field between two electrodes inside a vessel lumen
Plate 04
Transcatheter valve therapyProgram 04

Sizing Valvuloplasty Conductance Balloon

A transcatheter valve that is a millimeter too small leaks around its rim. Moderate or greater paravalvular leak roughly doubles the hazard of death, and it is decided by a sizing judgment made from CT slices weeks before the case.

~780kAmericans over 75 are estimated to have severe aortic stenosis, of whom roughly 590,000 are symptomatic

5 companies, each
proven in this building.

An incubator that owns an operating room does not have to take a founder's word for whether the device works. Nothing is spun out of 3DT until it has survived a large-animal study downstairs.

Bench to first-in-human,
without leaving the building.

Most device companies rent their evidence. They send a prototype to one vendor for bench testing, another for the animal study, a third for histology, and wait weeks between answers. Here all of it sits on one corridor, which is why an iteration takes days.

01

Surgical

  • Two sterile surgical suites with wide-screen viewing displays
  • Post-surgical recovery rooms
  • Anesthesia monitoring and extended physiological monitoring
02

Imaging

  • Two flat-panel C-arms in a poly-diagnostic configuration
  • Multi-angle acquisition with DICOM archiving
  • Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS)
  • Trans-thoracic and trans-esophageal echocardiography
  • Peripheral vascular Doppler ultrasound
03

Pathology

  • Experimental Pathology and Immunopathology Laboratory (EPIL)
  • Immunofluorescence and immunoperoxidase
  • Single, double and triple-antibody methods
  • Led by a board-certified pathologist
04

Computational

  • Computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis
  • Fluid-structure interaction
  • Mass and heat transport, electromagnetic simulation
  • High-performance computing through university partners
USDARegistered research facility, 93-R-0563AAALACAccredited animal care programOLAWAssured under NIH policy, D16-00907Tour the laboratory

All three are held by the California Medical Innovations Institute, the non-profit research institute in the same building with which 3DT shares a founder. Animal work runs in its facility and under its IACUC.

Bring us a problem in a vessel.

Commission a studyContact