Like a lot of us, Mark Nathan noticed that no matter how successful a business trip had been, he regularly returned home only to fall ill from the bacteria and viruses he encountered on airplanes, in hotel and conference rooms and everywhere in between.

What sets Nathan apart is that he decided to do something about it, and that decision ultimately placed him on the front lines fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

Trained and educated as a scientist and engineer, Nathan began experimenting with UV light and various ways to boost its germ-killing energy ability.

“Think of ultraviolet light as coming in three flavors,” said Terrance Berland, president and CEO of the company that would come of all this research, Violet Defense.

“Basically, you’ve got flavors A, B and C and the sun produces a bunch of it,” he explained. “A and B are what give you a sunburn. C we don’t get too much of because it’s blocked by the ozone layer.

“What our technology does is use a special ultraviolet source, a Xenon bulb, that flashes like a strobe light, and when it does it produces all three of the flavors on the spectrum,” he said.

Once he understood the germ-killing ability of the UV light source, Nathan developed a specialized lens that would both beef up the light’s disinfectant power and keep the system small enough to make it highly mobile and deployable.

Quality assurance testing showed Nathan’s bulb kills up to 99.9% of harmful bacteria and viruses on surfaces and in the air, including the stubbornly death-resistant norovirus.

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