Based on a recent reserach from department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering University of California, Cold Plasma has great potential for preventing the transmission of COVID-19 infections and treating severely infected COVID-19 patients.
The recent pandemic has greatly stressed supply chains, treatment modalities, and medical resources. Cold atmospheric plasma (CAP) has been used for a wide range of applications in biomedical engineering due to its many components including electrons, charged particles, reactive oxygen species (ROS), reactive nitrogen species (RNS), free radicals, ultraviolet (UV) photons, molecules, electromagnetic fields, physical forces, and electric fields. In this manuscript, we develop CAP devices for COVID-19. Our manuscript indicates the advantages of highlydeployable CAP devices for both sanitation and treatment, without the need for supply chains of special consumables such as hand sanitizers and the like. We hope that this timely research will help engage the broader community of engineers that wish to help the medical community with this pandemic and to prevent and treat future outbreaks.
The COVID-19 outbreak has led to dangerous shortages of sterilization capacity at hospitals, businesses, and in homes. Sterilization by CAP is an alternative to conventional and/or traditional sterilization methods. CAP sterilization is caused by plasma-generated reactive species inducing virus leakage and functionality loss. The levels of these reactive species can be adjusted by plasma source design (e.g., electrode orientation and gas feed mechanism), feeding gas types, operating conditions (e.g., electrode voltages and gas flow rates), the nature of the product/substrate, and the micro-organism itself.
Although the trajectory of COVID-19 outbreak is impossible to predict, timely development and implementation of effective countermeasures are necessary.19 CAP is an alternative to conventional and/or traditional sterilization and treatment methods for COVID-19 due to its causing virus leakage and functionality. Specifically, CAP-activated liquid, containing H2O2 and exhibiting low pH, is able to kill active COVID-19 virus on hands, medical PPE, surfaces, etc. This prevents the transmission of infection further causing several diseases such as COVID-19, nosocomial food-borne illness, and others. CAP generating NO can treat severe COVID-19 infected patients. Moreover, CAP immunotherapy is an effective treatment to fight COVID-19 infections because it can increase T cells and NK cells to normal levels and recover tissue/organ from dysfunction and coagulation function from abnormal. Until now, there are still no specific antiviral medications approved for COVID-19, however, development efforts are underway. In parallel and during this process, CAP can make its own important contributions to COVID-19 challenges.
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