Breakout Labs portfolio company 3Scan raises $6.67M from Lux Capital & Dolby Ventures

As reported in today’s Wall Street Journal, Breakout Labs portfolio company 3Scan has closed a Series A fundraising round of $6.7 million to support the continued development of their Knife Edge Scanning Microscope (KESM).

“While medical science has made incredible advances in recent years, anatomic pathology has remained relatively stuck in the 19th century — a manual, analog, and highly qualitative discipline,” said 3Scan founder and CEO Todd Huffman. “Our technology transforms anatomic pathology into an automated, digitized, and quantitative medical science. In a sense, we’re helping pathologists better diagnose disease and develop new therapies in much the same way that DNA sequencing has advanced the field of genomics.”

The KESM automatically sections and images tissue samples to create extremely high-resolution outputs, up to a terabyte per cubic centimeter. Then, 3D tissue reconstruction models are rendered with advanced data processing software to provide interactive image views, and apply quantitative analytics.

“We’re hugely impressed by Todd and the 3Scan team’s development of unique technology to supercharge research and accelerate the development of treatments for important vexing diseases,” said Josh Wolfe, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Lux Capital.

“Automation in medicine is happening faster than people realize,” said Wolfe. “3Scan is ushering in a new era of precision quantification and data in otherwise messy and often imprecise biology. This is the start of a flow of indispensable new tools for pathologists, researchers and doctors — and has the potential of a scientific ‘Rosetta Stone,’ unlocking previously unobtainable troves of information. Read the full story here.