Okra Medical Receives Patent for SafeMedWaste; Product Destroys Substances like Opioids

Press Release

Okra Medical today announce that the US Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent for Okra’s SafeMedWaste product suite which provides a safe, environmentally friendly, and cost-effective solution to ending the life cycle of highly-addictive controlled substances, including opioids.

“With our patent in hand, we are beyond excited to get SafeMedWaste out onto the market and offer this exciting new alternative to destroying dangerous drugs such as opioids,” Justin Stas, Chief Technology Officer of Okra Medical, said.

Currently many large manufacturers of prescription drugs incinerate their waste which is a costly solution to meet the regulatory requirement for destruction. Citizens, who have leftover prescription drugs often have to wait months for special “take-back” programs to safely discard the controlled substances.  Now, Okra Medical’s SafeMedWaste provides a disposal product with verified results from a DEA-licensed laboratory proving its effectiveness for regulatory destruction of more than 30 controlled substances.

SafeMedWaste is the only drug disposal product verified to completely denature a wide variety of controlled substances using high performance liquid chromatography, mass spectroscopy (HPLC-MS). HPLC-MS is the only data that the DEA considers reliable and resolute enough to meet their definition of non retrievable based on what we know currently.

“Receiving this patent has taken more than a year of hard work, but it’s worth every minute knowing SafeMedWaste will help people destroy highly addictive drugs and potentially keep them out of the hands of people who might misuse them,” said Okra Medical’s CEO Marshall Hartmann.

According to statistics from a National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 11.4 million Americans misused illegal prescription opioids in 2017. SafeMedWaste provides a critical solution through its breakthrough formula that completely destroys highly addictive controlled substances often used in hospitals, hospice, pharmacies and veterinary care clinics.  Destroying unused and unwanted prescription drugs helps eliminate the threat of diversion and misuse.

Patents are only granted for new, useful and non-obvious inventions. Okra Medical also filed a Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) application to protect SafeMedWaste intellectual property internationally.

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