BioLargo Spotlight: Advanced Oxidation System (AOS) Versus Waterborne Viruses

Re-posted from biolargo.blogspot.com
 
Hello, my name is Dr. Laura Patterson-Fortin, lead for BioLargo Water’s disinfection R&D team in Edmonton. My team has previously reported many exciting results using the AOS for water disinfection. In today’s blot post, I hope to inform our shareholders and followers of some really positive recent results we’ve achieved in virus disinfection, and to share a little bit on how and why we choose to use viral surrogates for our studies, namely Bacteriophages T4 and MS2. 
First, the results! You may have read in previous disclosures that our AOS consistently eliminates about 4 logs (or 99.99%) of Bacteriophage MS2 from water, which is more than a sufficient level of virus disinfection for most target water treatment applications. We’re proud to say that because of physical improvements to our AOS, we’ve increased our MS2 disinfection performance rate to 6 logs (or 99.9999%), which is effectively a 100x increase in performance. This is terrific news, because once we prove this increase in virus disinfection performance translates at industrial scale, we believe it will represent a significant competitive advantage over other water treatment technologies due to the AOS' greater kill rates and lower operational costs compared to other water disinfection technologies in many applications.
 
Source: The Institute for Molecular Virology
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Why do we (and others who do water disinfection development work) use Bacteriophage MS2 to test our AOS’ virus disinfection capabilities? A fine question, reader. The reason we test our technology’s ability to kill viruses using a surrogate like MS2 is that it’s a safe, cost-effective, and relevant way to assess virus disinfection performance compared to directly testing with highly dangerous human pathogens like hepatitis A, Norwalk virus, or Enteroviruses. Typically, only very special (and very expensive) labs with strict certifications work with human viruses, and even if that weren’t the case, it’s very time-consuming and expensive to work with human viruses. This is why the scientific community generally accepts virus disinfection results with Bacteriophage MS2 and other surrogates, with the understanding that once a technology goes commercial it will be tested and certified to work against actual human viruses.
This is why we are very excited about our recent results with MS2 disinfection – they show that our AOS is a powerful tool for disinfecting water containing viruses, and we’re anxious to see it commercialized and treating water around the world.
If you found this post interesting, or you would like to learn more about virus disinfection, don’t hesitate to engage us on social media at BioLargo Water’s Twitter account @BioLargoWater and BioLargo’s Twitter @BioLargo, or at our Facebook page.

What is a BioLargo Spotlight?
It’s an exciting time at BioLargo. We’re moving fast, and it can be difficult to keep our stockholders and the investing public informed of our progress. In light of this, we will be posting a series of short articles titled “BioLargo Spotlight”, highlighting certain business activities and other important information in between our required SEC filings. Of course, these do not replace our public filings, which contain more complete information than can be delivered in this forum, and thus we urge you to carefully read and rely on those filings for definitive information, and to review our risk factors and caution regarding forward-looking statements. We are optimistic about our business as we work hard to continue to grow and ultimately generate profits for our stockholders.   
Legal Disclaimer
Our attorneys remind us that while we believe these developments are important and that these small victories could add up and lead to big victories, at this stage they do not rise to the level of an official material disclosure. As the size and magnitude of these developments become material, we will naturally report that information in an 8-K and our regular SEC filings.
 

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