Ed Sinofsky, Ph.D.
View our timeline to learn more about how soothIR™ came to be!
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Late 1970’s
Ed begins his career in working with Infrared by getting a job at an Infrared laser company while in college in the late ’70s. He later worked at Bell Labs in Princeton working on research of infrared LED materials during the early days of infrared LEDs and Lasers.
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1980’s
Ed received his BS degree in Physics from SUNY Binghamton, and then a Ph.D. in Optics from the University of Arizona. Ed’s thesis was on changing an Infrared laser into a visible laser for the Air Force’s Star Wars Laser program.
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Mid 1980’s
Ed takes a position at CR Bard and leads the technical development of Laser Angioplasty, a technique to clear clogged arteries with lasers. As part of this development, he invented a new kind of medical laser system, called the Holmium laser. This mid infrared laser allowed physicians to remove tissue through a flexible fiber optic, which wasn’t doable until then. This was one of his first of many patents. This laser system is still used as a medical standard of care in Urology for prostate surgery, as well as kidney and bladder stone breakage. It is also standard of care in minimally invasive back surgery.
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1990’s
Ed left Bard in the late 80s to continue to pioneer Rare Earth Medical Lasers on his own. In 1990 he founded CardioFocus, which later went on to cure Atrial Fibrillation with an Infrared laser ablation technique. He raised $25 million from Venture Capitalists for the effort and Patented the idea of using an endoscope to see the site where the Electrophysiologist wants to ablate and guide the infrared laser diode system used to cause the burn, that forms the conduction block. The Company has since raised an additional $150 million and over 5000 patients have been treated using this technique, with a very high percentage of a permanent cure for this debilitating, stroke-causing arrhythmia. The treatment has been approved by the FDA for sale and use in the US. It is also in use in Europe and is becoming the AFIB treatment of choice in Japan.
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Early 2000’s
Ed left CardioFocus to pursue his artistic and craftsman side by starting Photoglow in 2003. Photoglow is a backlit picture frame he envisioned, invented, patented and has subsequently handmade thousands of units for ecstatic artists that could now hang the digital vision seen on their monitor onto the wall. Ed gained knowledge of visible LEDs used to light the picture frames, design of LED circuits, and has used over 1,000,000 LEDs in units delivered over the subsequent decades. He also met and has established a long term relationship with a premier LED strip manufacturer who has designed and built the LED circuits for soothIR.
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2007
In the subsequent years since the Holmium laser patent was issued, the laser industry had made 100s of millions of dollars selling Holmium lasers, and in 2007 CR Bard, Cardiofocus and Ed shared in a $15 million patent settlement from around 20 companies.
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Last 5 Years
In 2015, Jean developed chronic neck pain and within a year, Ed began experiments with Infrared LEDs to gently heat her neck as a kind of Infrared acupuncture but with no needles. Crude at first, they evolved into wearable comfortable LED collars that felt nice to wear, could be illuminated, and were soothing. He filed a provisional patent covering his findings in 2017. Jean’s neck was so much better that they filed a full international patent in 2019 and began to prepare for the launch of soothIR™. Ed currently has over 70 patents and was just issued his latest patent covering a new type of endoscope illumination (sold to Boston Scientific) in late September 2019.