University of Central Florida material scientists, Sudipta Seal, PhD and Craig Neal, PhD, talk about a new way to treat COVID-19 with nano-coatings.
Interview conducted by Ivanhoe Broadcast News in 2023.
What’s the idea behind the nano-coating?
SEAL: When COVID happened, we got all stuck to our homes, and we started thinking about what’s the next thing that we can do to combat this COVID. That time PPEs were short supply everything. NSF came up with some ideas on rapid funding and they told us it will be very rapid, and so we submitted in two months. So I partner with Professor Griffith Parks at College of Medicine. He’s a virologist, and we work together to find out if we can code these PPEs with a coating that can disinfect itself. We can increase the longevity of the PPE so that you don’t have that short-supply problem. Now over time, we have plenty of PPEs now, mask and we found this material can be applied to any surfaces. We touched here over the- we found that this material can be applied to any surfaces. We touch so many surfaces every day, we get sick. And we thought that if surface is coated by this material in normal light, it will continue to disinfect the pathogens and the virus and bacteria. That will reduce the infection of the people and people will be more healthy. So this has got a wide application besides PPE now, I can make a pen, door handles and so on and so forth.
Is this the brainchild? Like have you, as you’re stuck inside your house, thinking, “We’ve got to do something because this is the start of something that’s going to be part of our lives forever”?
SEAL: That is correct, because we all know that COVID created a lot of problems for humanity, but it also created a lot of opportunities. I think we are challenged to tackle this first pandemic. I’m sure there are many viruses out there, there’ll be many pandemics. So this has really created for us to think out of the box to see what can we create which will be safer for people and economically viable so that everybody can use this type of material. It can be transferred to many countries, to tech transfer office and all this thing.
So, when you see this in the future, where do you see it? Do you see it everywhere? Do you see it on every door handle? Do you see it in every hospital?
SEAL: Very good question. Yes, answer to your- short answer to your question is yes. This is a material based on silicon dioxide. Silicon dioxide is what we are stepping on every day in the planet Earth. But this material, when you decorate with other rarer elements on silicon dioxide, which is plentiful in this planet, and silicon dioxide is used for any type of application. So this is a material already in many uses everywhere. So just by decorating with a couple of other rare minerals, it can go to many household products. I would say it would be relatively safe to use that. So I would say coatings, door handles, countertops, hospitals, and so on, and so forth.
Is it something that all of these products would just be made with in the future or is it something that you would spray on or put on?
SEAL: It can be sprayed. For instance, if we’re looking at this garment right here, we have electrospinning machine on the other side of the room. I can infuse this material and make textile out of it too. So it can be self, disinfect clothing. It can use in many applications, in hospital settings, transportation settings, you name it right here because we’ve taught them feel every time we get a lot of other pathogens as well.
Is this is something that’s expensive?
SEAL: Yeah. I think this will be feasible in a sense silica is a very cheap material. You go to the ocean side, and you walk on the beach. That is nothing but silica. With these little minerals on top of silica, it will be much cheaper to use it. So I would envision- and the other advantage is that you don’t need to bring UV light anymore, it will create its own little UV to kill the bacteria and the pathogens. So it is self-regenerating type material that will only kill this omnipresence of these pathogens which are deadly to humans.
So, it’s not just COVID though, but can work on a lot more. Can you explain that?
SEAL: We have looked into the other viruses, and we published a paper last year on that. And we see they’re almost 6-7 other viruses were totally and heliated or killed by this material as well. So it has really moved into all the other pathogens that we plan to look at it the future.
Because it’s a nanoparticle that you can manipulate a little bit, does that mean it’s different pandemic that’s not SARS comes up that you could manipulate that to?
SEAL: Correct. One thing with nano is that it’s very tiny. You don’t have to use this material much at all, you get a lot of functionalities as well. And just by little tweaking, you can make it ready for other pathogens. See there can be bacteria, that can be viruses, and many other things in the future as well.
Like you said, you started thinking about all the shortage of PPEs. Would this have changed the course of COVID if something like this would have been out in the beginning where you could have sprayed it on PPEs, you could have gotten it in the hospital, if you could have gotten it on escalators, stairwell, all that stuff?
SEAL: I believe so, but it was not there at that time, or normal spray was there. Like we use bleach and all this thing. But bleach is pretty good, but it’s also not good for humans too. When you have to bleach can only function for one spray. And this type of coatings can stay on for a long time and disinfect because it regenerates its surfaces. It’s a cell feeling self-generation. Self-memory type material, that’s what I call it. When it sees a bacteria or virus, it will emit that little UV, enough to kill them. It’ll not damage you, but enough to kill them.
And I think that’s key. Like, what about bleach, Lysol?
SEAL: They are all good products.
I feel my eyes burn. This isn’t like that?
SEAL: No. This is safe.
Do you think, as a scientist, that a pandemic will never look the same again?
SEAL: We are more geared and ready with lot of tools that came out of COVID, so I believe we’ll be ready for- hope no pandemic comes in our lifetime, but if it comes, we’re ready to really combat this much more better way.
Do you see this material being sold in stores?
SEAL: Well, that’s the next step. We’re assigned to it as we create materials. We’ve got IP that was quick to get accepted, and next bit of steps that we’ll be walking with our tech transfer office, they will look into this and get to the next step for us. Yes.
What is the idea behind using nano-coating for disinfecting?
NEAL: We’re using nanomaterials because they have these unique properties that are different from the same material at a bulk scale. So at a large scale. When you shrink a material down to nano dimensions, they have unique physical chemical properties. And so we can take advantage of these to produce different effects. In biomedical science, we can use them for anti-cancer applications, diabetes, or for antimicrobial products.
Now, when you’re talking about nano, how big is nano?
NEAL: The dimensions of a human cell would be a couple of hundred microns, so a thousandths of a millimeter. And then when we talk about nano materials, these are 10-100 nanometers in dimension. And so this would be a thousandth of a micron. So, if you had a centimeter and you divide that by 10 million. So we can’t use a light microscope like you would look at human cells with. We have to use electron microscopes to be able to see the nanoparticles.
Why are nanoparticles better to work with when you’re doing something like this?
NEAL: So, one of the properties of nanomaterials, since you have- if you take a larger size particle and you shrink it down to those nano dimensions, you have a lot more atoms of the particles on their surface compared to what’s inside the material. So if you have some chemical, some material where direct contacts with whatever it’s interacting with has some biomedical effects. You have more percentage of the atoms on the outside indirect contact with your environment. So each atom becomes more effective.
How do you manipulate these nanoparticles to kill things like COVID?
NEAL: For our personal protective equipment coating technology, we made a material that takes white light, so sunlight or lights indoors in an office building absorbs that and then releases a higher energy wavelength in the UV region. So the UV light is viricidal kills the viruses.
This coating is turned on by UV lights. Is that the case, or does it just not allow the virus to exist?
NEAL: It absorbs white light and then releases ultraviolet light near the neighborhood of the particle. And so if you have a virus coming contexts so if we have a surface coating with our nanomaterial inside it and the virus lands on top of it. That interaction between the virus and the nanoparticle will allow UV to be absorbed by the virus from the nanoparticle. And it’ll break down genetic material. If the virus has a membrane around it, it will oxidize the membrane and prevent it from infecting a cell.
How do you create this?
NEAL: For this nanomaterial, we take a few precursor chemicals, mix them together, and do a heat treatment to produce the nanoparticles themselves. And the components we’ve chosen to produce those nanoparticles are chosen so that when they form the particles, they’re specifically especially tuned to absorb the light at the frequency of what you would find outdoors or in an office building. And additionally chosen so that they’ll do this unique up-conversion process, it’s a physical process, taking the lower energy light that the particles are exposed to and then releasing a higher energy light that’s damaging to the viruses.
What materials that do you make with it? Is it the sheet that you make? The sheet that you made, is that the same type of nanoparticles that you’re working with the disinfectant to spay?
NEAL: They’re completely different. So these up-conversion particles that we would disperse in a coding are silicon-based. And the film or whatever they’re dispersed in the polymer that we would use for the coating is completely arbitrary. So we could mix them into any polymer that would be useful for a specific application.
Where do you see those sheets being used?
NEAL: Originally, we had chosen to design them so that we could put them on personal protective equipment. So gloves, face masks, Pfizer’s, things like this. And because we just have these nanoparticles and they can be dispersed and whatever film polymer material we’d like, they can be conformal, so we can have them on gloves. You can move your fingers and they’ll still be active. Or we can have them on flat surfaces like a bench or tabletop.
Do you find it’s going to be less cost expensive or costly? Do you think this is something that could go everywhere and could be anywhere?
NEAL: Yeah. Case close. Yeah. Probably we think of it mostly. So initially we thought of PPE, but it’s also any public surface because especially for COVID-19 and the sars CoV-2 virus, the biggest issue at least initially, was that it was so stable on surfaces. So surface to surface transmission was a unique problem for the COVID-19 pandemic. So with our material, the virus would be inactivated on whatever surface and so couldn’t be transferred to someone else to get them sick. So it’s a transmission control.
Can you explain the nanoparticles? bring that out now and you show me because this is the end result.
NEAL: These are the nanoparticles themselves as synthesized. So, we can take these powders and disperse them into whatever polymer suspension that we’d like so that we can create a coating or a film.
Why do you need the polymer?
NEAL: It’s just to be able to retain these, the particles and to disperse them evenly so that they’re not clumped in one spot.
How time expensive is it to create that?
NEAL: It takes several hours and we get the gram scale. So, a good amount.
How long does it last once you put it on a surface?
NEAL: This should last for at least weeks. It depends on how much mechanical wear is applied to the film, but it shouldn’t degrade really on its own over normal operating times.
Is there anything that you would like to add?
NEAL: I would just add with the nanoparticles, you could say, they’re self-powered because like if you had we were talking about Lysol. If you had a chemical disinfectant, it tends to work by undergoing a chemical reaction. So the main component of the disinfectant is inactivated as soon as it undergoes that chemical process. With these materials, it’s a physical process. And we’ve shown that the material doesn’t become inactive after performing this process over again. So it can- the particle antiviral mechanism can persist over long times. And it just absorbs white light so you don’t need to apply any extra power or energy to it.
What excites you about this whole project?
NEAL: Given that the nanomaterial has this antiviral property, is very interesting that you can take those particles and put them with any other material that you would need for an application. And they’ll still be active. A lot of times you have your nanomaterial and then some material for an application. And whatever it’s interfacing with is crucial to its activity. But for these particles, we can put them wherever we like, as long as they can get direct exposure to white light they’ll work.
Do you feel like it’s a goal of yours, now, to concentrate on that type of thing?
NEAL: Yeah. Certainly. The pandemic brought awareness that this could happen at anytime, again, to perhaps an even greater scale. And it brought to our attention the factors that contribute to the growth of a pandemic. And as materials engineers and material scientists, we now have a better idea of how we can apply our skills to prevent something like this happening again.
END OF INTERVIEW
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