CEO. Robert Davis

About CEO. Robert Davis


Stromatec, Inc., USA

Title: What acupuncture needles can tell us about connective tissue?


Robert Davis, M.S., L.Ac., Founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer. Stromatec is Davis’ third successful small business start up. He has been an acupuncture clinician since 1999. He served as President of the Vermont Association of Acupuncture & Oriental Medicine from 2001-2006. He is currently a board member of the Society for Acupuncture Research.



Q1.

Well, I understand that you’re currently working as a licensed acupuncturist in USA.


That’s right.


Q2.

And as well as a successful entrepreneur, right?


That’s right, yes.


Q3.

For starters, could you tell us about how you stepped into acupuncture research field at first.


Ah yes. Well, I was an acupuncturist, I’ve been an acupuncturist since 1999, and I see many patients, currently I probably see about maybe 40 patients a week. I am two or two and a half days in the clinic. But, at the time that you’re asking about I was full time acupuncture clinician, and in the United States, Helene Langevin’s lab is in the same town as where I was practicing, in Burlington, Vermont. And I had come to know of her research and found it very interesting. And I’d had her give a talk for our local acupuncture association and things like that. And her work was, as she developed some devices in order to accomplish her basic science work in the lab, her program officer at the National Institute of Health suggested that there might be some commercial potential for the instruments that she had developed along with an engineering colleague at the university. So Helena Langevin and David Churchill approached me about starting a company, and we first started the company, this was in about 2003, we first started the company, we first called it Meridian Sensors, because it was mostly focused on what has now become the Acusensor device which was just a way to measure the, umm actually it started as a way to measure the forces involved with needling. But, so, in order to get this kind of a grant, because it’s considered like technology transfer or translational in nature to try to get good equipment out of the lab and into the clinic, there are these special type of grant that our funding agencies give just to small businesses to commercialize technology. So we formed the company just in order to do that. So that’s how it got started.


Q4.

So you started making Acusensor at your company.


Yes, well first, our first in a very first phase 1, we developed the device which now is the force sensor of the Acusensor. But after the phase 1, we realized that we needed to capture motion as well, because you can imagine if you measure like “Oh, there’s a high torque here.” But did you get a high torque by rotating it 10 degrees or 300 degrees? And we realized that we needed to add a motioning as well. So when we did the phase 2 of our project, we developed the motion sensors of that became the complete Acusensor. Then some of our subsequent projects became more focused on making measurements using needles and ultra sound to capture forces and motion that occurs during acupuncture needling, but has to do with the tissue itself rather than just the needling. So that’s when we decided to broaden our name to Stromatec, stroma refers to, stroma is a, it refers to connective tissue, it is kind of an anatomical word that is like the extra cellular matrix, the stroma.


So that’s where the name comes from. And that’s when over time, I started to think of needling in, or I started to think of an acupuncture needling two different ways. One way is we use an acupuncture needle to deliver a treatment to create change in the body. And the other way that we started to do was to use the needle as a probe to question the body where get derived information from the body. So I kind of think of that is kind of the yin and the yang of acupuncture needles, where the yang is where you’re delivering a treatment and yin is where you’re asking a question from the tissue. Does that make sense?


Q5.

A little bit, yes.


So that’s how we think of it.



Q6.

I see, thank you. Interesting. So then the company Stromatec, is it currently just producing Acusensor? Do you have any plan for developing more devices?


Yes. So right now we have the Acusensor, and that device is available for sale. It’s a research device or a teaching device, we don’t make any clinical claims about it because no one has done research of linking needle movement with improved outcomes which is what we would need to make a clinical claim that it improves treatment. But we have other devices and I will talk about them in my talk today. One is called Stromatorque and one is called Stromaglide and these devices are basically where, the Acusensor just passively measures what an acupuncturist does, it doesn’t control anything, it just records movements and forces that interact between the practitioner and the patients, or if you are using it for basic science, whatever you’re doing with it. These other devices, you know, if we’re going to query the tissue, we need to standardize the input of the needle. In other words, we need to control the speed that the needle moves, we need to use sensors to detect what’s going on. So in that controlled aspect, the Stromatorque controls the rotation of the needle and measures needle torque, the Stromaglide actually uses ultra sound to measure tissue motion, but the movement is induced by a needle in a controlled manner. That will become more clear, I think, when you see some of my slides today.


So those devices, we haven’t sold to anyone, we’re hoping to develop them ultimately we hope that they can be useful as a way to help clinicians measure differences in people’s connective tissue and that they will prove to have a clinical application. Right now, we haven’t proven that. So they would be, but they’ll be certainly available for other researchers who might want to use them in their own research. Does that make sense? And they’re available as investigational devices for researchers, but once again we haven’t done the work to have any kind of a clinical claim.


So the second two devices Stromatorque and Stromaglide are more in the category of diagnostic devices whereas the Acusensor is more of a research or a teaching tool to just measure, it’s like a measurement tool.


Q7.

Thank you very much for sharing this story with us, it’s very interesting and very informative as well. Thank you for joining this interview. This will be the end.


Well, okay. Thank you



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