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.
- Surgical suites
- 02
- Flat-panel C-arms
- 02
- Pathology read
- In house
What is behind the door
Four groups, one corridor. A device can be cut in the morning, implanted in the afternoon and read by a pathologist the same week.
Surgical
- Two sterile surgical suites with wide-screen viewing displays
- Post-surgical recovery rooms
- Anesthesia monitoring and extended physiological monitoring
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
Pathology
- Experimental Pathology and Immunopathology Laboratory (EPIL)
- Immunofluorescence and immunoperoxidase
- Single, double and triple-antibody methods
- Led by a board-certified pathologist
Computational
- Computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis
- Fluid-structure interaction
- Mass and heat transport, electromagnetic simulation
- High-performance computing through university partners
Multi-scale, because
a device fails at one scale.
Work here runs across disciplines, across physics and across four orders of magnitude of length. A thrombogenic surface is a molecular problem that presents as an organ-level one.
Molecule
Cell
Tissue
Organ
Experimental and computational. Fluid and solid mechanics, mass transport, electromagnetics. Molecule to cell to tissue to organ. The point of holding all of it in one place is that the simulation and the animal can disagree, and somebody in the building has to reconcile them before the program moves.
External resources
- Scripps Research
- Salk Institute
- UC San Diego
- UC Irvine
- San Diego Supercomputer Center
Access is held through sponsored research agreements and collaborations, alongside a standing relationship with the California Medical Innovations Institute next door.
Accredited, not merely equipped
Animal work is the part of device development where a shortcut is both easiest and least forgivable. The program here is registered and externally accredited, and the paperwork travels with the study.
USDA
Registered research facility, 93-R-0563
AAALAC
Accredited animal care program
OLAW
Assured under NIH policy, D16-00907
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.