New Delhi: Safer and greener batteries, zero-waste building solutions, and antimicrobial surface coatings to prevent the growth of COVID-19. These are just some of the recent discoveries made by Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington resea
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A company whose technology can kill 99.9 percent of human coronavirus in two hours is among three start-ups based on Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington research that dominate the finalists in the Innovation Gold Category of this year’s Wellington Gold Awards.
Inhibit Coatings was founded in 2016 by Dr Eldon Tate, who studied in the University’s Te Wānanga Matū School of Chemical and Physical Sciences, and uses a broad-spectrum silver antimicrobial agent effective at killing more than 650 types of microorganisms, also including Escherichia coli, Salmonella spp., Influenza A (H1N1), Listeria monocytogenes, and Campylobacter spp.
The technology’s effectiveness against human coronavirus is the company’s latest discovery, with the agent able to be applied to textiles, filters on face masks, and surfaces inside vehicles such as planes or buses.
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Eldon Tate, chief executive of Inhibit Coatings, says independent testing in the United States found the company’s silver nanoparticle coatings reduced Covid-19 by 99.9 per cent.
Eldon Tate is pretty sure his company s silver nanoparticle technology is a safe and effective way to deal with the Covid-19 virus and its contamination of surfaces. In October this year as part of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment’s Covid-19 Innovation Accelerator programme he was able to prove that the silver nanoparticle water-based polyurethane coating his company had made could reduce Covid-19 by 99.9 per cent. The coating was sent to the United States for independent testing and was found to reduce the human coronavirus by that amount.