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

合作提案：RAPID：受 SARS-CoV-2 污染的个人防护装备的热灭菌

• 批准号: 2030117
• 负责人: Chien-Te Tseng
• 金额: $ 7.9万
• 依托单位: University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-06-01 至 2021-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2030117&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Proposal; RAPID; Thermal; Sterilization

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.

随着COVID-19大流行持续蔓延，美国的医务工作者面临口罩、面罩和长袍等个人防护设备的严重短缺。因此，许多医生和护士正在重复使用一次性使用后将被丢弃的个人防护设备，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设备消毒指南，以便能够安全地重复使用。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灭活;该项目将为在给定温度下实现灭菌所需的时间提供循证指南。该项目还将能够预测人类冠状病毒在各种气候下的寿命，这对流行病学家预测SARS-CoV-2的传播以及COVID-1死灰复燃的严重程度至关重要-这个合作研究项目将产生一个热力学模型，该模型结合了建立在Arrhenius方程和速率定律与现有的和即将到来的实验数据，以准确地描述SARS-CoV-2的热灭活时间。提出的热力学模型将把病毒视为经历热变性的大分子，并将用于预测病毒（包括SARS-CoV-2）的灭活时间，方法是将每种病毒的物理特性作为输入，以确定病毒灭活速率对温度和其他环境条件的依赖性。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、表面材料和除温度外的其他条件的影响;（2）实验证明SARS-CoV的热灭活导致的灭菌，2的医疗个人防护设备，并通过纳入这些实验结果的数据来完善热力学模型;以及（3）表征在重复的热消毒循环期间个人防护设备的热降解。这项工作将导致对病毒热灭活的前所未有的基本理解，这将有助于对抗当前的COVID-19大流行，并为建模导致未来爆发的病毒提供基础。该奖项反映了NSF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。