The recent COVID-19 pandemic, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) arose the need for contingency methods against infectious diseases. The losses caused due to the infections caused by the virus accounted for millions on both the economic and more importantly on the human side. The World Health Organisation reported 4.565.483 deaths derived from COVID-19 at the beginning of the third trimester of 2021. It is also caused significant economic losses due to lost work hours. In order to reduce the virus transmissions, politicians proposed different measures like lockdowns to increase social distancing but when doing essential tasks people had to go out and infections happened.
Even after the pandemic, the situation is critic when referring to infectious diseases. More than 20% of the global annual deaths are caused by infectious diseases and up to a third of those are caused by virus infections. Apart from that, food contamination poses a challenge to be solved in the European union. There were 5146 reported foodborne outbreaks in 2018 from the EU Member States resulting in illnesses to 48,365 people. A vital agent in the process of disease transmission are the high traffic surfaces also known as fomites. Examples of these are, toilets in theatres, schools, restaurants, bars, shopping centres and sports facilities. 80% of infectious diseases are transmitted by unclean hands touching contaminated surfaces. There are existing strategies to mitigate the effect of these so-called fomites. One of them is the development of self-decontaminating surfaces. The methodology used consists on applying antimicrobial coatings to the surfaces to be treated. The issue with the actual treatments is that they are not durable enough for the destined task and they cause environmental hazards, due to their formulations.
In this sense, SUSAAN project poses a solution to help reducing the infection cases of the viruses. The project focuses on the development of new, sustainable antiviral (AV) and antimicrobial (AM) coatings with high durability for textiles and high traffic objects made of plastic and metal. SUSAAN addresses the main aspects related to high performance surface coatings. With the combined forces of key-players in the current value chain of coatings, textiles and high traffic surfaces, SUSAAN covers a set of ambitious targets focused on: a) Effective inorganic and bio-based Active Nano Materials, b) Scalable, high-performance and sustainable formulations, c) Antiviral and antimicrobial non-porous high traffic surfaces, d) Antiviral antimicrobial textiles.
These objectives have been developed considering three main pillars addressing all those aspects related to (1) Scalable manufacturing technologies and easy to repair solutions, (2) Safer-by-design materials avoiding environmental concerns and impact and (3) Standardisation aspects for effective European deployment of marketable and usable technologies.
The following specific objectives are set:
• Objective 1: Developing a range of improved Active Nano Materials (ANMs) safely tailored to the applications.
• Objective 2: Increasing fast performance and durability of the AM/AV coatings in high traffic non-porous surfaces.
• Objective 3: Increasing sustainability and stability of the AM/AV coatings in textiles.
• Objective 4: Validating the scalability of the products and the pathways for commercialization.
