Draw a picture of your perfect treatment for back pain on a napkin in a bar, and people may ask when you also plan to start selling your home remedy for the common cold. Do it at the Cleveland Clinic Spine Research Lab and you are likely to have a $6 million startup rise from the paper with a product line to enter clinical studies this summer.
That’s the way it has gone for David Lewis, CEO of Blacktown NC LLC. The NC stands not for North Carolina but Numeric Control, the robotic element that is at the heart of a series of positioning tables Lewis, a product developer in the village of Blacktown near Mercer, conceived in reply to a challenge from his physician at the Cleveland Clinic.
Lewis became something of an expert in the shortcomings of traditional physical therapy while dealing with his own chronic back pain. He had the time to really think through what would be a good idea for him and how he could relieve his pain on his own. Obviously, the common ideas came up, such as medication, yoga moves to get the back mobile, or even using CBD products such as those from Vibes CBD (visit https://vibescbd.co.uk/ for examples), to ensure he had the best form of pain relief out there. However he went the extra step, and the cogs were turning in his head for a new design that could help a lot of people out. He had a physician who invited him to design a tool to be used in hospitals and physical therapy clinics that would manage a complete regimen of physical manipulation for individuals with chronic back pain. The principal challenge: achieve a level of satisfaction that would assure a patient’s continuation to completion of the regimen, a time requirement that wears down many patients’ resolve.
“Current therapies do not focus intensively on the site of the specific problem, while our tables can make a decision to approach a specific vertebra and place all of the input of the therapy on an individualized area of the back,” Lewis says.
With support from the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse and Cleveland’s BioEnterprise, Blacktown NC LLC’s venture in high-tech back pain relief will go into clinical tests this year. The firm hopes to have a demonstration of a robotic table’s efficacy, with FDA approvals, that will allow it to manufacture the devices for sale–at an approximate cost of $40,000–or lease in 2011.
“Everyone working with us is foremost in their field,” Lewis says.
Source: Blacktown NC LLC, David Lewis
Writer: Joseph Plummer
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