"Purifying Plasma"
Knoxville News-Sentinel
November 4, 2002
by JJ Stambaugh
UT, local firm develop top new health technique
An invention by a Knoxville company that may revolutionize how buildings and vehicles are disinfected has been recognized as one of the world's best new technologies by R&D Magazine.
The process, called One Atmosphere Uniform Glow Discharge Plasma, has been shown to kill 99.9 percent of all known viruses, bacteria, spores and biological warfare agents, according to the researchers who developed it. It can be fitted onto most existing central heating and air systems and is relatively inexpensive.
"You don't have to install HEPA-grade filters," said Dr. Kimberly Kelly-Wintenberg, a former University of Tennessee researcher and president of Atmospheric Glow Technologies, or AGT."You don't need an expensive vacuum system."
In addition to air filtration, Kelly-Wintenberg says the technology has a wide variety of potential applications in the fields of healthcare and transportation as well as military uses.
The R&D 100 Awards - which are sometimes called the "Oscars of Innovation"- are judged by a panel of 60 experts pulled from a variety of disciplines. The program is in its 40th year, and past winners have included the digital wristwatch, the automatic teller machine, the halogen lamp and the fax machine.
While scientists aren't exactly sure how the plasma technology works, it has proven effective in cleansing the air in buildings, Kelly-Wintenberg said. During the process, airborne particles are drawn from the air by a charged filter, which is then sterilized at regular intervals by the creation of a plasma field.
Matter exists at all times in one of four states: solid, liquid, gas or plasma. Generally, the state of matter is determined by external factors such as temperature and atmospheric pressure.
The new technology, however, allows researchers to create a plasma field from ordinary air that creates a type of reactive oxygen species.
"You're disrupting the membranes of micro-organisms and thereby causing pores or holes to be formed in the membranes," she said. "You're interrupting the integrity of the cell and that causes death."
The technology was first developed by a team of UT researchers in the early 1990s and the UT Research Corp still holds the patent, Kelly-Wintenberg said. AGT, however, holds the exclusive license on the patents through a legal arrangement with the university.
"The UT Research Corp. has worked very diligently with us to help us license the technology and has been our advisor since that point," Kelly-Wintenberg said.
Using UT research to "spin off" companies as a regional economic development tool has been championed by UT President, John Shumaker, who favors the creation of a nonprofit UT Research Foundation to streamline the process.
"AGT is an example of how the university and the private sector can work together to bring commercially viable technologies out of the university for the benefit of the state," Shumaker said. "We've got to encourage our faculty and our students to commercialize research."
"In Tennessee, that's innovative. In the rest of the country, it's the expectation."