Volcano Corp.

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As Baby Boomers age and Americans put on pounds, their cardiovascular systems become more at risk for blow-ups.

John Dahldorf, the chief financial officer for the fast-growing medical technology company Volcano Corp., describes such an explosion when explaining how his company got its name: “Plaque builds up in the arteries, that last Big Mac gets eaten, and the arteries erupt and break through the wall, and there’s a heart attack. It looks like a volcano.”

Rancho Cordova-based Volcano tries to prevent such internal eruptions by building tiny disposable ultrasound catheters that give three-dimensional views of the interiors of arteries and state-of-the-art consoles that record the findings. These images help doctors determine the best placement of stents and other treatments for clogged arteries. The technology is also used to see if the inserts, which prop open arteries, are working as intended.

Sensor-based images of plaque-clogged arteries have been around since the 1990s, but initial technology produced gray pictures that looked like satellite photos of a hurricane.

IN LIVING COLOR

Volcano has moved into a new realm: color. It has an exclusive licensing agreement with Cleveland Clinic to commercialize technology that includes the color coding of different plaque types in arterial images. Previous intravascular ultrasound, or IVUS, technology couldn’t differentiate plaque composition.

Peter Fitzgerald, an interventional cardiologist at Stanford University and a pioneer in intravascular ultrasound, explains how detailed images help doctors. “If you want to know about a neighborhood, you need to know more than just the street,” he says. “You need to know about the driveways, the houses, how big they are. That’s what lets us see and learn.”

The market seems fertile for Volcano, the company estimates that ultrasound catheters are used in only 10 percent of stent procedures in the United States. Volcano says it has not been harmed by safety concerns that drug-coated stents may raise the risk of blood clotting and heart attacks. “We believe that as stenting activity rebounds, an increasing number of clinicians will utilize IVUS to facilitate the procedure,” Scott Huennekens, Volcano’s president and chief executive, says.

Volcano, the area’s largest medical-equipment maker, employs about 350 people in Rancho Cordova and approximately 550 people worldwide. The company conducts manufacturing, research and development in two buildings off Kilgore Drive and has a production distribution unit on Mercantile Drive. Rancho Cordova also serves as its corporate headquarters, though Dahldorf is the only executive on site.

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