Dermot Monaghan¹, Lara Maroto¹, Patricia Killen¹, Tommaso Sgrilli¹, *Victor Bellido-Gonzalez¹, Oihane Hernandez-Rodriguez^2
1Gencoa Ltd, Liverpool, United Kingdom; ²IK4-Tekniker, Eibar, Spain
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the major global challenges facing healthcare. Prevention of infections acquired in hospitals is the most effective way to fight AMR. Bacteria and other pathogens could be transferred via shared touch surfaces and instrumentation, and unfortunately health centres like hospitals present a breathing ground opportunity for some of the more resistant strains of pathogens. Maintaining an sterile environment is not always easy. Some of the complex instrumentation and equipment in hospitals, like robotics surgery instrumentation, are difficult to undergo through regular complete sterile conditioning protocols as they require complex and expensive cleaning procedure. In some cases the standard sterilisation autoclaving is not possible due to the nature of the instrumentation itself. An approach which would offer a lower risk of cross contamination in such environments is the use of surfaces which can be “activated” and rapidly kill pathogens. In this paper we will present solutions based on surface coating technology which by light-activation becomes a very effective self-sanitizing surface, able to kill to levels of >99.99% of bacteria. Recent developments by the authors have provided new analytical techniques for quantifying the light-activated antimicrobial efficiency of these coatings. Some of the coatings developed have been able to achieve high sterilisation performance even under “standard office” visible light conditions. Results will be presented.