History
Sarasota Medical Products Inc was formed at a high value given an exclusive contract and initial purchase orders we had in place with the 4th largest brand of Ostomy products. SMP’s and this partner’s agreement was to bootstrap a full product line launch with a growth-staged plan of implementation, on account of SMP in start-up lacked substantial funds needed to launch all products en masse. Once SMP’s founders signed the SBA loan to build out the manufacturing floor and purchase equipment needed to meet FDA required standards, this agreement and relationship dissolved. SMP terminated the contract and began offering our proprietary products to other brands. Our founder’s Walter F Leise Jr and Denis Keyes were instrumental in laying SMP’s foundation and are critical technical assets with a wealth of knowledge in the industry.
While the ultimately failed partnership was difficult, SMP strove to become a medical device developer as a primary strategy for growth. This change significantly reduced SMP’s value and projections over the short term, however, it helped drive and motivate Dr. Leise, CEO/CSO, to research and develop novel technologies which are now being widely adopted within the market. Dr. Leise began investigating how to make a hydrocolloid adhesive that could be removed by stretching and breaking the adhesive bonds to itself and to a patient’s skin, which is one of our core proprietary formulations. This impressive formulation is the foundation for our largest selling product category and has been widely adopted and celebrated by our customers and their patients. During this formulation’s development process, he observed and discovered a way to make moldable and stretchable adhesives that act as gaskets around a patient’s stoma and absorbs over 1000% of its weight in liquid. Because SMP refused defeat in 2011, in 2018 we now develop and private label hundreds of products to 20 different companies and are in talks with several more about custom development and manufacturing.
Most significantly, following years of intense research and long hours in the lab, Dr. Leise successfully developed and launched a completely novel, non-silver, antibacterial hydrocolloid for wound care and Ostomy care. Our antibacterial dressings have been successfully tested against MRSA, Staphylococcus strains, Acinetobacter strains, Pseudomonas strains, and Escherichia strains.
The role of antibacterial agents in wound dressings is to reduce the incidence of bacterial colonization within the dressing while providing a potential barrier to bacterial entry into the wound. The MagicShield ® Hydrocolloid is effective in controlling the growth of bacteria commonly found to populate wound dressings, while the outer thermoplastic layer is effective at providing a physical barrier to bacterial entry into the wound. We finalized our FDA 510(K) submission in mid-summer 2015 and received FDA clearance in late November. In 2017. We have recently received EU patent approval and we are working towards finalizing our US, India, Chinese, and Japanese patents in 2018.
SMP Inc is not only a developer of novel adhesives and medical devices, but we have also developed several processes that reduce labor requirements and overall costs of making our adhesives. Our global competitors use a large amount of labor to mix and extrude adhesive rolled goods, in contrast, SMP has made innovative process improvements which reduce the labor costs by up to 85%. This provides significant cost-saving and price leverage as compared to our competitors. With these savings, SMP can continue to develop more innovative products and keep costs low for our customers and their patients.