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的大流行继续传播，美国的医务人员面临着个人防护设备的严重短缺，包括口罩，面罩和礼服。结果，许多医生和护士都在重新使用单一使用后丢弃的个人保护设备，从而增加了他们染上导致COVID-19的SARS-COV-2病毒的风险。这些医务人员以及公众迫切需要可靠的准则来灭菌个人防护设备以实现安全的重复使用。干热灭菌几乎可以在任何地方（包括家用烤箱和米饭）进行，缝隙内或织物内的病毒很容易被灭活；该项目将为在给定温度下实现灭菌所需的时间提供基于证据的指南。该项目还将在各种气候中对人类冠状病毒的寿命进行预测，这对流行病学家对预测SARS-COV-2的传播以及Covid-19 Pandemic的复兴的严重性对流行病学家而言至关重要方程和速率定律具有现有和即将出现的实验数据，以准确描述SARS-COV-2的热灭活时间。提出的热力学模型将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在内的病毒的灭活时间，通过将每种病毒的物理特性作为输入来确定病毒灭活率对温度和其他环境条件的依赖性。该项目将旨在实现三个目标，即：（1）模拟由于热降解而导致的SARS-COV-2灭活，包括湿度，pH，表面材料和其他条件的影响； （2）由于在医疗个人保护设备上SARS-COV-2的热灭活而在实验上证明了灭菌，并通过合并这些实验结果中的数据来完善热力学模型； （3）在反复的热灭菌周期中表征个人防护设备的热降解。这项工作将导致对病毒的热失活的前所未有的基本理解，这将有助于与当前的Covid-19-19型大流行作斗争，并为导致未来爆发的病毒建模提供了基础。这项奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过基金会的知识优点和广泛的影响来评估NSF的法定任务，并被认为是值得的支持。