Time flies by, and it is now nine months since the ‘STOP’ project formally started on 1st September 2022. We are looking forward to our next face-to face working meeting to be hosted in June by the project partner FORTH (Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas) on Crete. At this meeting, we will discuss the progress the project has made to date, and our plans for the next six months.

Progress

Project members have created new laser-structured surfaces, several types of inorganic nanoparticles and peptide chains and begun to characterise these and to combine them as part of the planned screening phase of the project. )Kater, we will choose the most promising materials for further development and tetsing). In parallel, the details of procedures for testing antimicrobial activity have been developed (including the nature of test substrates and how these are to be cleaned and sterilized prior to standard testing, and how to make fair comparison to existig antimicrobial materials). Although still quite early for the planned progress, we have also begun to plan in detail how we will apply the novel coating formulations in a reproducible way for testing, and what information we will need to provide in order to eventually obtain ethical approval for field trials in a nursing home or similar environment.

Collaboration

The ‘STOP’ project was represented at a meeting of all of the projects funded from the same Horizon Europe call for proposals (i.e. all with broadly similar aims, but different methodologies). We would like to thank our colleagues from the SUSAAN project for organising this meeting, which highlighted a number of possible synergies between projects.

Prof. Stamboulis from the ‘STOP’ project attended a European Commssion briefing about the PARC and IRISS initiatives, concerned with chemical safety and sustainability )matters of great importance should the antimicrobial materials developed by the project ever become used on a large scale). We will take the ideas and information from these initiatvies into account when we choose our candidte materials for scaled-up production and detaied investigation.