Innovating Clean, Improving Tomorrow
Who We Are
At Abradem®, we believe that micro-abrasives are under-appreciated. Often, pure liquids are simply not up to the job of removing truly tenacious residues. Even when these liquid cleaning products are used at high temperatures and flow rates. Even when these liquids are highly acidic or alkaline. Even when these liquids contain some very specialized enzymes. You cannot blame people for wanting to only use liquid cleaning products for all their cleaning jobs. But truly tenacious residues will always be easier to remove when they are first scoured using solid micro-abrasives. When doing so, you would want these scouring microparticles to be hard, and sharp, yet small enough to penetrate these residues. Above all, you want these micro-abrasives to move with high velocity so that their scouring action is immediately impactful. And if you have hard to access, or clean-in-place equipment to clean, you would want these scouring particles to be magically self-propelled. Well, Abradem®’s micro-abrasives are self-propelled. While not magic, the US Patent & Trademark office in 2022 did judge this invention novel enough to issue its Univ. of Illinois inventors a US Patent (11,458,221). Abradem® Corporation has exclusively licensed this patent for all its uses (except for applying this cleaning product onto living tissue).
A Breakthrough That Started It All
Abradem®’s story begins in 2018 with Dr. Hyunjoon Kong filing for a patent and getting his first research paper about his invention published in the Journal Applied Materials & Interfaces. Originally, Dr. Kong called his invention a “microbubbler.” Abradem® Corporation’s eventually founder, Paul SerVaas, read Dr. Kong’s article online. He was immediately captivated by the notion of “self-propelled” microabrasives. This was because the microabrasives in the Bar Keepers Friend® (BKF) Cleanser that Mr. SerVaas was manufacturing were not self-propelled. You had use “elbow grease” and be able to lay your hands on what you were trying to clean when using BKF.
Fortunately, the BKF factory is located in Indianapolis, which was just a two-hour drive from Dr. Kong’s Univ. of Illinois office in Champaign/Urbana, IL. After the two men met, and after much additional “sponsored research,” Abradem® Corporation was founded, and a licensing agreement was signed between it and the Univ. of Illinois’ Board of Regents.
Since 2018, five additional peer reviewed journal articles have been published by Dr. Kong’s research group. His invention is not referred to as Abradem® in these articles because Abradem® is a registered trademark. In their published papers, Dr. Kong and his team have variously referred to their invention using names, such as:
- Microbubbler
- SLAM (Self-Locomotive Antimicrobial Microbots)
- MnO2-Doped Diatoms
- MnO2 BioSilica
Emergency Response Readiness
Staffing & Coverage Needs
Policy & Procedure Gaps
Incident Response Planning
A Mission Built on Practical Impact
The pathogens that cooperate to build biofilms have been doing so for longer than humanity has existed. They are exceptionally good at surviving. Including having the ability to rapidly evolve to counter various modes of attack on their communities. For example, they can quickly vary the rigidity of their protective biofilm to better withstand physical attacks and stresses. Attacks on biofilms that work for while can cease to work. Biofilm communities can develop a tolerance/resistance to existing disinfectants that used to work well. Even when 99.9999% of pathogens are killed, “persister” pathogens can reproduce so rapidly that the colony is reestablished within days – especially when there are remnants of the non-living biofilm (EPS) left to provide the survivors shelter and sustenance.
At Abradem® Corporation, we believe it will be extremely hard for biofilms to evolve an effective defense against our physical attack. We believe this because there is nothing in any known biofilm as hard as silica. Also, the high velocity of these microparticles (> 100 µm/sec) guarantee that if a biofilm makes itself soft in order not to be chipped away, Abradem® particles will penetrate the biofilm creating pockets of pressurized oxygen gas capable of blasting whole layers of biofilm off the substrates they are attached to.
Fact are stubborn things!