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Company to start trials on coating that fights superbugs

Eastern Health partnership is part of initiative to support home-grown innovation

PETER JACKSON LOCAL JOURNALISM INITIATIVE REPORTER peter.jackson @thetelegram.com @pjackson_nl Peter Jackson is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter covering health for The Telegram.

A 2019 study (https://www.cmaj.ca/content/191/36/e977) published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal found that while hospitalacquired infections (HAIS) have gone down slightly in the past decade compared to the previous one, they are still a persistent problem.

The study found, on average, that “one in 12 patients admitted to Canadian health-care facilities (and one in 8 patients in an ICU) developed an infection that was not part of their presenting medical illness but was acquired as a result of the care they received.”

The most concerning of these are the so-called superbugs, germ variants that become resistant to antibiotics and disinfectants primarily from overuse. One of the most common is Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), although there are several others.

A company based out of St. John's has been working on an antimicrobial surface coating to prevent those bugs from surviving in hospital settings, and will soon be partnering with Eastern Health for real-world trials.

“Our product is an aerosol spray that leaves a narrow layer of a totally transparent coating on a surface,” Robert Hoyles, vice-president of sales for Polyamyna Nanotech (http:// www.polyamyna.ca), said in a recent Zoom call.

Such coatings are not new, but Hoyles and company co-founder Kishan (Bala) Gorityala say the way theirs works is proprietary and patented.

In essence, it creates a semipermanent positive charge on solid surfaces.

“Every type of virus or bacteria utilizes negative charges in their pathways, so this disrupts those regular functions of the bacteria or virus indiscriminately and kills them on the spot,” said Hoyles.

Unlike regular cleansers, the coating can last as long as six months, or a thousand cleaning cycles.

And it's non-toxic, says Gorityala. “It won't sensitize your skin.”

SIX-MONTH TRIAL

Farah Mccrate, Eastern Health's director of research and knowledge transfer, says the decision to conduct trial use of Polyanyma's product Keep Klear sprang from an innovation strategy launched in February 2020.

“One of the key pillars of that is to frame Eastern Health as a test bed for innovative concepts and solutions, and to work with private industry and all kinds of private vendor partners to get the product in the door, pending the appropriate regulatory approval, of course,” Mccrate said during the Zoom call.

“Ultimately, what I would like to know is … what is its impact in terms of patient outcomes for hospital acquired infections.”

She admits HAIS are always a concern.

“It's something we always keep on our radar and on our organizational scorecard, for example, to track the rates of these kinds of things (because) their impact can be so devastating.”

The lab already has a protocol in place to randomly swab surfaces for microbes, she said, so they'll be able to piggyback on that process to test the product's effectiveness against a control group.

The trial period should last for six months, she said.

Hoyles said the company is exploring marketing opportunities in the Middle East and India, and hopes to promote its use outside of healthcare facilities in places such as restaurants, airports and cruise ships.

While the product was developed before the pandemic, Hoyles admits the COVID-19 crisis has helped highlight the importance of surface hygiene, even if the novel coronavirus is not quite as transmissible on surfaces as originally thought.

“That's made our job a little easier,” he said.

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2021-05-08T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-05-08T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://saltwire.pressreader.com/article/281599538373515

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