Professor Leo Poon, Principal Investigator at the Centre for Immunology & Infection and Co-Director of HKU-Pasteur, published in ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering about the development of an antimicrobial coatings from ZnO particles that reduce the infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 suspensions by >99.9% in 1 h.
The advantage of a coating is that it can be applied to a variety of objects, e.g., hand rails and door knobs, to hinder the spread of disease. Two porous coatings were prepared: one from submicrometer zinc oxide particles bound with silica menisci and the other from zinc oxide tetrapods bound with polyurethane. Experiments on glass coatings show that infectivity depends on porosity for hydrophilic materials, wherein aqueous droplets are imbibed into the pores.
