The Fabric of Innovation

The ambulance screeches to a stop outside the hospital, siren wailing. A medical team hustles a patient through the hallway to the operating room. Surgeons scrub. Healing medicine drips into a patient’s veins. Family members pace the waiting room. Every hospital is filled with life-and death drama. But another crisis that plays out in hospitals across the globe is silent and invisible: microbial cross-contamination. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one of every 31 hospital patients in the U.S. picks up an infection related to their care. These infections cost patients’ lives and billions of dollars in additional health care expenses. For nurses and other health care professionals, frequent exposure to pathogens makes their workplace risky. 

Chemistry Prof. Yuyu Sun and Assoc. Prof. Nancy Goodyear of Biomedical and Nutritional Sciences are trying to change that. The two are leading a project to develop a material that offers health care workers true protection from harmful microbes. The material will not only survive laundering, but its anti-microbial properties can also be boosted in the wash with bleach. They are undertaking the project with a two-year grant of more than $417,000 from the U.S. National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).

Microbe-laden clothing is a big problem in hospitals. Studies show that soft fabrics are quickly contaminated by bacteria and other pathogens. From the fabric, the pathogens can be transferred to clean surfaces, including a nurse’s just-washed hands. Scrubs are washed every 1.6 to 1.8 days, Goodyear says, while white coats are washed even less frequently—every 11.3 to 13.5 days. About 37 percent of hospital facilities laundered their privacy curtains only when they were visibly soiled with blood or body fluids, according to Goodyear. That’s a lot of opportunities for fabrics to transmit potentially deadly germs.

The anti-microbial fabrics developed by Sun and Goodyear through the NIOSH-funded research could lead to safer working conditions for health care professionals, and to healthier hospital patients, too. 

Although their expertise is in different disciplines, a common thread runs through Sun and Goodyear’s research: Both scientists are dedicated to improving everyday materials to make us—and our planet—healthier.

In his laboratory in Olney Science Center on North Campus, Sun pursues research in anti-microbial and biofilm-controlling systems, drug delivery and biomedical devices. His undergraduate and master’s degrees were in textile engineering, and he has an affinity for solving everyday problems by using textiles with special properties.

Three years ago, Sun won a grant from the Walmart Foundation to develop a more efficient fabric-dyeing process. He used nanotechnology to create dyes that are pulled into fabrics using magnetic fields. Controlling the dyes with magnetic fields means that more dye winds up on the fabric and less dye winds up in wastewater, where it can be a major pollutant. Sun has a patent pending on the technology.

Since he was a doctoral student at Fudan University in Shanghai, Sun’s research has focused on polymers. He recently designed dentures that can fight off the pain and swelling of yeast infections because they are made of a plastic that can absorb and release various drugs that kill fungi and yeast.

“I don’t feel the boundaries between polymers, textiles and biomedical engineering,” says Sun. “I think of myself as a materials chemist. These materials are sometimes a resin used for water filtration; sometimes it is dental tubing used in a dentist’s office. It can be a denture used by older patients or bone grafts for joint replacement. It may be a piece of fabric worn by doctors or a pillow used by patients. For me, they are all materials. My goal is to incorporate them into new functions to solve real-world problems.”

Goodyear’s research focuses on safer approaches to disinfection, particularly in health care settings. She’s researched the effectiveness of vinegar and of an oil found in thyme. She has investigated mops and cleaning products and confesses that it’s still hard for her to walk by a mop bucket without wondering if what’s inside is safe and effective. And she was the principal investigator for a study that looked at the bacterial contamination of nursing students’ scrubs.

Sun and Goodyear, who is a member of the Zuckerberg College of Health Sciences faculty, did not know they were on parallel paths until they met to discuss their research several years ago. They instantly recognized the common thread that ran through their work.

“It became obvious immediately that we would each benefit from collaborating,” Sun says. But while it was clear that Sun and Goodyear had common research interests, it took them a while to sew up the necessary funding.

Sun has been working with N-halamines, a group of chemical compounds widely used as disinfectants, since his days as a postdoctoral researcher. N-halamines are just as good at killing germs as laundry bleach (hypochlorite bleach), but are more stable, less corrosive and less likely to break down into toxic compounds.

N-halamines have long been used as disinfectants in municipal drinking water and wastewater treatment plants, as well as in the food processing and restaurant industries. Sun’s expertise is combining N-halamines with polymers to create materials that solve difficult health care and environmental problems through the N-halamines’ anti-microbial properties.

In Goodyear’s lab, a doctoral student had been studying contamination on nurses’ scrubs. It made sense to the researchers to weave together the N-halamine disinfection research with the scrub contamination research.

A UMass Lowell seed grant funded a pilot study, which helped provide details for the federal grant application. 

“When we first submitted the application for funding a few years ago, the government [was] shut down,” Goodyear says. That slowed the application, but eventually, it was awarded funding. “We appreciate the support from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health,” Sun says.

Threading The Research Needle

Sun and Goodyear, who are serving as co-principal investigators on the project, are developing an anti-microbial fabric embedded with N-halamines. Sun’s lab will address how to bind the N-halamines to the fabric, while Goodyear’s lab tests the anti-microbial function.

By binding the N-halamines to the fabric, instead of merely coating the fabric with it, Sun expects the anti-microbial function won’t wear off through washing or rubbing. Other, coated fabrics quickly lose their anti-microbial properties in the wash. The chemical properties of N-halamines allow this fabric’s anti-microbial properties to be recharged when it is laundered with bleach.

With existing anti-microbial scrubs, health care professionals have no way of knowing how quickly they are losing protection from microbes. “It’s not something you can see, the way you can tell when a fabric is losing water repellency,” says Sun. With the new fabric, health care professionals will be able to check the anti-microbial function with test strips that show a dark color when the protection is strong but fade in color when the protection dissipates.

Once Sun and his team, which includes research scientist Jianchuan Wen and chemistry senior Jake B. Sartorelli, have a fabric that meets their criteria, they will send it to Goodyear’s lab for testing with bacteria, fungi and viruses. Adorrah-Le Khan, a student in the College of Health Science’s Master of Public Health (MPH) program, has extensive training working with the many types of pathogens that will be used in the study.