Technology
Oxafence Active Protection™ Technology
A different kind of antimicrobial approach
Many materials used in high-exposure environments have no built-in antimicrobial function and are designed to act only as passive barriers. Where microbial control is required, risk is often managed through periodic disinfection – before use, after use, or between uses – rather than during use itself.
Existing antimicrobial treatments have enabled important products, but their limitations have restricted where they can be applied or how they perform under real-world conditions. As a result, most materials remain passive at the moment when exposure actually occurs.
Oxafence Active Protection™ was developed to address this gap by enabling antimicrobial performance directly within materials, allowing them to engage with bacteria and viruses during everyday use rather than relying solely on episodic intervention.
How the technology functions
Oxafence is a metal-free, materials-applied antimicrobial technology platform built on well-established photosensitizer chemistry, including the use of Methylene Blue. While these molecules have been studied for decades in academic and medical contexts, Oxafence represents a new approach to applying them within everyday materials.
When incorporated into materials and exposed to normal indoor light, Oxafence’s protective dyes can enter an energized state and interact with oxygen at the material surface. This interaction produces singlet oxygen, a short-lived, highly reactive form of oxygen that can disrupt the structure of nearby microbes at the point of contact.
Because singlet oxygen exists only momentarily and acts locally, its activity is confined to where it is generated. The reactive species quickly returns to its ground state as ordinary oxygen, without accumulating or persisting beyond the immediate interaction. Over time, an individual dye molecule can generate 10,000 to 100,000 singlet oxygen events, enabling a sustained mode of action within the material.
This mechanism has been explored extensively in the scientific literature. Oxafence translates these principles into a scalable, materials-applied platform designed for integration into soft, high-use, inhalation-adjacent materials.
Designed for real-world materials integration
Oxafence can be formulated to meet the technological demands of product manufacturers. Its components are commonly used and scalable, and the technology does not rely on rare earth metals, quaternary ammonium compounds, bleach, or alcohol-based chemistries. Because of its formulation flexibility, Oxafence can be integrated into both disposable and reusable materials, and it can be tailored for:
Healthcare materials and PPE
Operational and defense applications
Industrial textiles and surfaces
Emerging consumer applications
Because Oxafence is a platform technology, it can be adapted to different materials and manufacturing processes without requiring entirely new supply chains or systems.
Platform Attributes
Simple and scalable ingredients
Oxafence relies on protective dyes that are understood in medical and materials science contexts and can be added through existing manufacturing methods.
Formulation flexibility
The technology can be adjusted for efficacy across various substrates, from high-use fabrics to engineered surfaces.
Application breadth
Oxafence is being developed for integration into a wide range of product categories, enabling partners to explore new classes of active materials.