The activities of MIRIA project are focused on the development of antimicrobial coatings. Many of the MIRIA project partners had previous experience in this topic, mainly at laboratory level but in some cases also at industrial level. These experiences were the starting point for the planning of technical activities. The MIRIA project aims to integrate the expertise of different laboratories to achieve results superior to those that each laboratory was pursuing on its own. The temporal flow of activities starts from the design of innovative solutions, coming from the contribution of different experiences. These solutions are consolidated at the laboratory level and then applied to industrial-scale components, solving all the problems linked on large dimensions, complex shapes, large-scale reproducibility. The last activity, which constitutes the crowning achievement of the project, will be the setting up of a simulated operating room where the solutions developed during the project will be applied on the components: door handles, operating table, touch screens, bedlinen…
In detail, the MIRIA project will develop coatings, deposited with various techniques, which can incorporate nanopowders containing a biocide agent. Various candidate solutions were identified at the beginning of the project, to increase the probability of success. Moreover, the surfaces to be treated are quite different from each other: e.g. coatings that work very well on glass substrates may not be as effective with metal components, and vice versa. Most likely, there will not be a universal solution that can be applied to every type of surface; it is a safer approach to have several candidate coatings to cover as many components as possible.
At the 18-month checkpoint, the project is on schedule. The partners in charge of the production of the nanopowders have already produced the first batches and sent them to the partners who develop the coatings. Numerous laboratory scale coated samples are already available for testing. Functional characterizations showed that some solutions achieved the antimicrobial efficacy targets set for hospital environments (which represent the target of the project); other solutions have not reached the targets but are promising; others did not work. Based on these preliminary results, a second campaign will be planned: the best solutions will be consolidated, the promising ones will be optimized, the ineffective ones will be abandoned to focus on the others.
The functional characterizations are carried out by a team of partners different from those who develop nanopowders and coatings. In this way, all coatings, regardless of the laboratory where they were deposited, will be characterized in the exact same way, allowing comparison between the results. These functional characterizations are: the measurement of antimicrobial efficacy; toxicological tests, to verify that the coatings are harmless to human beings and environment; durability tests, to estimate the service life of the coatings in terms of antimicrobial efficacy.
A further activity started in these first months concerns the detailed design of the simulated operating room and the definition of the tests to be carried out within it.
The described technical effort has been accompanied by exploitation, communication and dissemination activities. The latter, which as mentioned are important for the MIRIA project, in the first 18 months of the project were limited to posts on social media and communications at specialized conferences. In the coming months, as relevant technical results are available, this activity will be expanded to the organization of dedicated workshops and newsletters to specific stakeholders.
