By Jeanne M. Hoban

When Amol Soin, M.D., began the six-year B.S./M.D. program at Northeast Ohio Medical University, he expected to have a successful, but traditional, career in medicine.

By the time he completed his residency at Rush University and a fellowship at Cleveland Clinic, the 2002 NEOMED alumnus realized clinical training was just the beginning. “I’m a naturally curious person,” he said.

“In addition to my residency and fellowship, I got two master’s degrees in science from Dartmouth [College] and Brown [University], and then an M.B.A. from the University of Tennessee, which helped me a ton because it was a physician-based M.B.A.”

His M.B.A. cohort included both experienced physicians and new medical school graduates who challenged his thinking and helped him refine his business model. “It felt like I not only got a degree, but free consulting out of it,” he joked. “By the time I was done, I opened a practice and went for it.”

“It” is Ohio Pain Clinic, a freestanding, multidisciplinary pain management center, which Dr. Soin opened in 2007 in his hometown of Dayton.

From the start, Dr. Soin was committed to an integrated approach to pain management. “You have to address the social and emotional aspects of pain in addition to the physical,” he said. “Sometimes there’s no surgery, no pill that’s going to fix things. People still need help. Psychological therapy, coping mechanisms—all those are integral.”

Roots of Entrepreneurship

Dr. Soin traces his entrepreneurial spark back to the 1990s, when he attended a wedding during the height of the dot-com boom. Surrounded by young founders building companies and raising capital, he wondered how that same energy might apply to healthcare. “Nearly 20% of the U.S. GDP is healthcare,” he said. “It’s one of the largest industries out there, so there have to be innovative opportunities to deliver care cheaper, more efficiently, better.”

As he explored medical specialties from cardiology to orthopaedics to nephrology, pain management stood out. “I realized that in pain, we’d been doing the same thing for four or five decades: derivatives of aspirin or morphine,” he noted. “They don’t work all that great, and they all have baggage. Meanwhile, people are still in pain. I thought, this is a cool opportunity.”

Breakthrough Ideas

His first patent was a pharmaceutical pill for diabetic neuropathy using sodium nitrate, a compound more commonly associated with preservatives in bacon and bologna than with biomedical innovation. But sodium nitrate has properties that promote blood vessel and tissue regrowth, including nerve repair.

Dr. Soin ran clinical trials and ultimately licensed the drug to Cleveland Diabetes Care in a $225-million arrangement that included royalties and milestone payments.

As his success grew, so did his credibility with potential partners and investors. “After something like that happens, funding becomes a lot easier,” Dr. Soin noted. “People think lightning might strike twice.”

His second major venture emerged during his fellowship year: a nerve stimulator to treat amputation stump pain, developed in part through the BioEnterprise business incubator in Cleveland. Dr. Soin played a role in helping to build a company, called Neuros Medical, around the device. The path to approval from the Food and Drug Administration took far longer than expected. “We started in 2008 and thought we’d be approved by 2012 or 2013,” he said. “We got approved in 2024. Sixteen years!”