They say beauty is only skin deep, that appearances can be deceiving. The real substance – the stuff that matters – is below the surface. But what if you could learn what lies beneath without having to dig for it? That’s the idea behind DAMAE Medical’s approach to optical biopsies.

A French startup founded in 2014, DAMAE Medical is on a mission to improve skin cancer diagnoses through early stage and real-time diagnosis. The company, which joined the 3DEXPERIENCE Lab in fall 2019, has developed a novel hand-held imaging device that allows non-invasive 3D visualization of skin tissues. Put another way: DAMAE Medical’s breakthrough idea brings the microscope to the patient.

Accurate, non-invasive diagnoses of skin cancer through optical biopsies could be life-saving technology. Skin cancer is the most common and fastest growing form of cancer in the world, resulting in more than 10,000 deaths in Europe each year. DAMAE’s innovative, patented approach to detection – called LC-OCT, which stands for Line-field Confocal Optical Coherence Tomography – has been used in clinical studies for three main uses:

• Early stage and real-time diagnosis for all skin tumors
• Definition of accurate pre-surgical margins for skin surgery
• Guiding therapy to enable less invasive therapies, follow-up treatment response and to select the best treatment/dosage for individual patients.

Since getting involved with the 3DEXPERIENCE Lab, DAMAE Medical has adopted the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on cloud for design and simulation. The company’s LC-OCT device was designed on SOLIDWORKS. The platform has helped with management of the complex development process, including managing development cycles during design and testing, collecting and implementing user feedback and starting the loop over as needed.

Recently, DAMAE released their first product, the deepLive medical device, a best-in-class imaging system that pairs penetration with cellular resolution in 3D. The technology is adapted to the imaging of multiple skin conditions, promoting efficient, reassuring and non-invasive patient management. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform helped power DAMAE’s efforts to industrialize the device and prepare for production scale-up and market introduction.

Watch the short video to learn more about DAMAE Medical’s deepLive device. And click here to read about this and other 3DEXPERIENCE Lab projects.