Collaborative Proposal: RAPID: Thermal Sterilization of Personal Protective Equipment Contaminated with SARS-CoV-2

随着COVID-19大流行的继续蔓延，美国的医务工作者面临着个人防护装备的严重短缺，包括口罩、面罩和防护服。因此，许多医生和护士重复使用本应在使用一次后丢弃的个人防护装备，从而增加了他们感染导致COVID-19的SARS-CoV-2病毒的风险。这些医务工作者以及一般公众迫切需要可靠的个人防护装备消毒指南，以便安全重复使用。干热灭菌几乎可以在任何地方进行（包括家用烤箱和电饭煲），裂缝内或织物内的病毒很容易被灭活；该项目将提供在给定温度下实现灭菌所需时间的循证指南。该项目还将能够预测人类冠状病毒在各种气候条件下的生命周期，这对流行病学家预测SARS-CoV-2的传播以及2019冠状病毒大流行卷土重来的严重程度至关重要，因为今年秋冬季天气可能会变冷。该合作研究项目将建立一个热力学模型，将基于Arrhenius方程和速率定律的框架与现有和未来的实验数据相结合，以准确描述SARS-CoV-2的热失活时间。提出的热力学模型将病毒视为经历热变性的大分子，并将用于预测包括SARS-CoV-2在内的病毒的失活时间，方法是将每种病毒的物理特性作为输入，以确定病毒失活率对温度和其他环境条件的依赖。该项目旨在实现三个目标，即：(1)模拟SARS-CoV-2因热降解而失活的过程，包括湿度、pH值、表面材料和温度以外的其他条件的影响；(2)通过实验验证SARS-CoV-2在医用个人防护装备上的热失活灭菌，并结合实验结果数据完善热力学模型；(3)研究反复热灭菌循环过程中个人防护用品的热降解特性。这项工作将使人们对病毒的热失活有前所未有的基本了解，这将有助于抗击当前的COVID-19大流行，并为建立导致未来疫情的病毒模型提供基础。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread, medical workers in the United States face a dire shortage of personal protective equipment, including masks, face shields, and gowns. As a result, many doctors and nurses are reusing personal protective equipment intended to be discarded after a single use and thereby increasing their risk of contracting the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. These medical workers, and also the general public, urgently need reliable guidelines for sterilization of personal protective equipment to enable safe reuse. Dry heat sterilization can be performed almost anywhere (including home ovens and rice cookers), and viruses inside of crevices or within fabrics are easily inactivated; this project will provide evidence-based guidelines for the time required to achieve sterilization at a given temperature. The project will also enable prediction of the lifetime of human coronaviruses across various climates, which will be of extreme importance to epidemiologists in predicting the spread of SARS-CoV-2 as well as the severity of a resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic that may accompany the return of colder weather this upcoming autumn and winter.This collaborative research project will produce a thermodynamic model that combines a framework built on the Arrhenius equation and the rate law with both existing and forthcoming experimental data to accurately describe the thermal inactivation time of SARS-CoV-2. The proposed thermodynamic model will treat viruses as large molecules that undergo thermal denaturation and will be used to predict inactivation times for viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, by incorporating physical properties of each virus as inputs to determine the dependence of viral inactivation rate on temperature and other environmental conditions. The project will aim to achieve three objectives, namely: (1) to model the inactivation of SARS-CoV-2 due to thermal degradation, including the effects of humidity, pH, surface material, and other conditions in addition to temperature; (2) to experimentally demonstrate sterilization due to thermal inactivation of SARS-CoV-2 on medical personal protective equipment and refine the thermodynamic model by incorporating data from these experimental results; and (3) to characterize thermal degradation of personal protective equipment during repeated thermal sterilization cycles. This work will lead to an unprecedented fundamental understanding of the thermal inactivation of viruses that will help fight the current COVID-19 pandemic and provide the basis for modeling viruses that cause future outbreaks.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.