Advanced biosafety materials for prevention and theranostics of biosafety issues

Since its global outbreak in 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been a severe threat to life and health and aroused worldwide concern about biosafety. Capitalizing on this, various disciplines, such as mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, material science, and computer science, have been urged to develop novel protocols for the prevention and theranostics of biosafety issues. In particular, chemistry and material science have been addressed to provide unique strategies for solving biosafety issues, such as infections by pathogenic microorganisms like viruses or bacteria. Based on this, a new field termed “biosafety materials” has emerged.

Biosafety materials: Ushering in a new era of infectious disease diagnosis and treatment with the CRISPR/Cas system.

Despite multiple virus outbreaks over the past decade, including the devastating coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the lack of accurate and timely diagnosis and treatment technologies has wreaked havoc on global biosecurity. The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated proteins (Cas) system has the potential to address these critical needs for tackling infectious diseases to detect viral nucleic acids and inhibit viral replication. This review summarizes how the CRISPR/Cas system is being utilized for the treatment and diagnosis of infectious diseases with the help of biosafety materials and highlights the design principle and in vivo and in vitro efficacy of advanced biosafety materials used to deal with virus attacks.

Biosafety chemistry and biosafety materials: A new perspective to solve biosafety problems.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has rapidly swept around the globe since its emergence near 2020. However, people have failed to fully understand its origin or mutation. Defined as an international biosafety incident, COVID-19 has again encouraged worldwide attention to reconsider the importance of biosafety due to the adverse impact on personal well-being and social stability. Most countries have already taken measures to advocate progress in biosafety-relevant research, aiming to prevent and solve biosafety problems with more advanced techniques and products. Herein, we propose a new concept of biosafety chemistry and reiterate the notion of biosafety materials, which refer to the interdisciplinary integration of biosafety and chemistry or materials. We attempt to illustrate the exquisite association that chemistry and materials science possess with biosafety -science, and we hope to provide a pragmatic perspective on approaches to utilize the knowledge of these two subjects to handle specific biosafety issues, such as detection and disinfection of pathogenic microorganisms, personal protective equipment, vaccine adjuvants and specific drugs, etc.. In addition, we hope to promote multidisciplinary cooperation to strengthen biosafety research and facilitate the development of biosafety products to defend national security in the future.

Biosafety materials: an emerging new research direction of materials science from the COVID-19 outbreak

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is a serious biosafety event that is causing a severe impact on the global society and economy. Thus, the importance of biosafety is once again being valued worldwide. Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, most national governments have been encouraged to speed up the development of biosafety, which places higher requirements on researchers in biosafety and relevant fields. Many problems have been exposed due to the outbreak of COVID-19, including unavailability of effective drugs and vaccines, difficulty in fast or real-time virus detection, insufficient protective equipment, and shortage of transportation equipment for infected patients. To a certain extent, these biosafety problems are partly due to the limited biosafety-related research in materials science. Currently, the tremendous research efforts in materials science around the world have provided a wide variety of materials with peculiar properties to solve biosafety problems. This review attempts to give a perspective on how the development of novel materials can help scientists tackle the challenges in biosafety. Considering the importance of materials science in the biosafety field, it is urgent for us to officially propose the brand new concept of "biosafety materials", which can be a future scientific discipline that utilizes materials science and theory simultaneously to produce materials, related products, and equipment to solve biosafety problems. Herein, we have aimed to draw worldwide attention on the new discipline of biosafety materials and the active cooperation between materials scientists and biosafety-related scientists to propel its development.