Development of a Novel Method for Direct Capture of Human and Animal Pathogenic Viruses from Air and a Protocol to Assess their Fate and Decontamination in Indoor Air

bacteriophages are available, no such methods exist for testing air sanitizers against human and animal viruses.

While indoor air is recognized as an important vehicle for human pathogens, standardized and scientifically valid methods for pathogen survival and inactivation remain generally unavailable. Therefore, CREM Co Labs has undertaken to address this gap. The scientific objective of this developmental project has been to establish and use an aerobiology test chamber at CREM Co Labs to assess the fate of human and animal viruses in indoor air, assess the activity of indoor air decontamination technologies and develop a novel technique direct capturing of human and animal viruses.

Testing air sanitizers against animal and human viruses in a large (e.g., 25 cubic meters) aerobiology chamber represents a major gap in the air sanitizer industry. CREM Co Labs took on this challenge starting with the direct capture of viruses from experimentally-contaminated indoor air. So far, such testing has been performed with human coronavirus OC43, Murine norovirus(MNV), feline calicivirus (FCV) .  We have been successful in the direct capture of MNV, FCV and HCOV OC43 from the chamber. We regard this as a major development in aerobiology.

 We are proceeding with further experimentation with viruses.