STTR Phase I: Development and Commercialization of the SafeLight Family of Antimicrobial Materials for Combatting the COVID-19 Pandemic and Hospital Acquired Infections

The broader impact of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project is the development of new antimicrobial materials to reduce the spread of harmful bacteria and viruses in a variety of settings, particularly for self-disinfecting personal protection equipment against SARS-CoV-2 to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. While primarily intended for use in hospitals, these antimicrobial materials can also impact bio-defense; military facilities; food processing, packaging, and service industries; wastewater treatment facilities; daycare and long-term care facilities; and even personal households. Beyond the current pandemic, this technology can address hospital-acquired infections, which add an estimated $30-45 billion to health care costs every year; and the food service industry, where norovirus foodborne infections alone account for an economic loss of about $5.8 B annually in the United States. The proposed technology offers significant benefit for the current COVID-19 challenge and beyond. The proposed project will develop light-activated surface-disinfecting materials based on photodynamic inactivation that generates singlet oxygen – a highly reactive yet environmentally benign species – to cause non-specific damage to microbes, rendering them inactive. The technical challenges are: 1) the development of chemical species capable of producing singlet oxygen upon exposure to light, but stable at the high temperatures of manufacturing processes, for which we will start with a known class of compounds; 2) the development of a method for the production and embedding of the newly-developed photoreactive compounds within relevant materials, particularly for the manufacture of personal protection equipment; and 3) evaluation of process efficacy for virucidal (against coronaviruses), antibacterial, antimycotic and sporicidal use. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.