Contagion-free look: filters and bandages with turmeric pigment will protect against viruses

An international team of scientists has created a material capable of inhibiting the activity of viruses. For this purpose, the authors applied silver nanoparticles combined with curcumin to a polymer filtration membrane with large pores. The development can be used, for example, to filter water from bacteria and viruses to make it drinkable, or as a barrier material in medicine - an effective covering material for wounds and burns.

Decontaminated with intelligence

You can sanitize water (remove bacteria and viruses from it) by using membranes - thin polymer films with pores that, like a sieve, allow liquid to pass through but retain microorganisms or viruses. However, this method has a disadvantage: if the pores are too small and commensurate with the size of viruses, filtration is very slow, and water purification becomes a long and inefficient process.

Scientists from the Center for Applied Physics of the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions in Dubna with colleagues from Armenia and South Africa found that if you put substances with the right biochemical properties on a membrane with pores, whose diameter is larger than the size of viruses - passing through it viruses are inhibited, that is, lose the ability to penetrate the cell, binding to cell receptors. After that, the virus can not multiply and capture new cells, and therefore becomes safe for humans.

To this end, the authors fixed dosed amounts of silver and curcumin nanoparticles on the surface of the membrane. They were chosen on the basis of earlier studies, which showed that these substances inhibit the activity of viruses of different nature, including the herpes virus. In addition, curcumin has an antibacterial effect and is therefore often included in some anti-inflammatory agents.

Then, a solution containing viral particles was passed through a track membrane modified with the complex of the above nanoparticles using a syringe.

- Such decontamination membranes can be used in water purification plants. In personalized medicine it is possible to use them as an effective covering material for wounds and burns: viruses and bacteria will not get on the affected and thus more vulnerable parts of the skin, " Alexander Nechaev, Ph.D. in chemistry, deputy head of the Center for Applied Physics at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), told Izvestia .

Scientists conducted several series of experiments on different viruses: herpes, stomatitis, influenza and encephalomyocarditis. To assess the effectiveness of the material, the researchers compared how much the number of active viral particles in the solution after its passage through the membrane.

From herpes and stomatitis

It turned out that the membrane inhibited 99% of herpes virus and stomatitis virus particles. At the same time on influenza and encephalomyocarditis viruses the influence of such materials was weaker: in this case 80% to 85% of particles were inhibited.

This suggests that curcumin with silver nanoparticles acts selectively, the scientists explained. Unusually, despite the fact that the pores of the membrane were larger than the virus particles, by applying a mixture of silver nanoparticles and curcumin, the decontamination effect was as strong as in the case of filtration with small pores. This is because the viruses lost their ability to multiply and infect cells. Compared to fine pore filtration, this method is an order of magnitude faster and does not require the use of high pressures. This indicates that the method is suitable for faster and more effective water disinfection.

- In the future, we plan to create composite antiviral and bactericidal materials for medical devices - for example, infusion filters for fine purification of medicines or respirators, which will not need to be disinfected, - said Alexander Nechaev.

The developed membrane, which contains two components of agents with antimicrobial properties at once, made it possible not only to effectively retain viral particles on the membrane surface, but also to inactivate their pathogenic properties, Ilya Kolyadenko, head of enzyme design and engineering group at ITMO PIH, told Izvestia. According to him, this approach can be called promising, as it allows for a double effect, which increases the likelihood of disinfection of filtration objects.

Both components - silver and curcumin - demonstrate high antifungal and antibacterial activity, which in the future may make them candidates for the creation of effective and environmentally friendly systems for disinfection of liquids and air from pathogenic microflora, said the expert.

-The properties of silver and curcumin nanoparticles have long been known. But the application is important. Therefore, this topic may be of interest to a wide audience, - told "Izvestia" leading researcher of the laboratory of controlled optical nanostructures MIPT Alexander Barulin.

The results of the study, supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (RNF), were published in the journal Surfaces and Interfaces.