Highlight: Disinfection you can see

Kinnos has created a patented color additive called Highlight®, which is combined with existing bleach disinfectants that are already being used widely. Highlight-enhanced bleach is colorized to easily visualize coverage so you never miss a spot and then fades from colored to colorless after a few minutes to approximate when the contact time of the disinfectant has been met (30-second video: www.kinnos.us/highlight-powder). It's as easy as telling someone to make sure everything is covered in color and when the color is gone, the surface is safe to touch. Highlight overcomes language, training, and education barriers that enables a completely untrained person to immediately disinfect surfaces correctly every single time. Our goal is to provide the public with peace of mind whenever they see colorized disinfection and to provide cleaners with greater confidence in their safety.

Studies have shown that less than half of critical surfaces are properly cleaned with a disinfectant, and that up to 80% of surface-transmitted infections could be prevented with better cleaning technique[1]. COVID-19 presents an urgent need for well-trained front-line staff that are complying with effective disinfection technique including 1) complete coverage on surfaces, and 2) letting the disinfectant sit on the surface undisturbed for the requisite contact time to fully inactivate the pathogen. 

Our award-winning Highlight® technology is a powder additive that comes packaged in pre-measured pouches. Simply tear open the pouch, pour the powder into 5 liters of standard diluted bleach solutions, and the powder will dissolve after 60 seconds. Highlight-enhanced bleach solutions can then be used to disinfect floors, walls, vehicles, tables, and other waterproof surfaces that require disinfection. Highlight® was a grantee of the USAID Fighting Ebola Grand Challenge and has previously been deployed internationally by medical organizations and emergency responders for Ebola and cholera outbreaks, and is now being implemented for enhancing disinfection practices against COVID-19.

Highlight® improves disinfection technique by providing real-time visual feedback to front-line cleaning staff, which not only impacts the lives of the cleaning staff by providing confidence that they’re disinfecting surfaces correctly, but also instills peace of mind in the public when they see colorized disinfection.

Before COVID-19, 1 in 25 patients in the US got an infection from the hospital, amounting to 722,000 healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) every year. The impact on patients is an extra week in the hospital and more than 99,000 deaths annually. Now, COVID-19 has elevated the importance of effective infection prevention measures for the general public. Thousands of new front-line workers must be trained to disinfect public spaces which requires a succinct way to ensure that disinfection technique is enforced. Highlight® presents a visual and implementable solution that enables people to feel safe and helps staff to do an effective job.

Highlight is the only color additive for disinfectants on the market and is patented. Other infection prevention innovations like UV lights and misters/foggers also seek to address human error left behind by manual cleaning, but they are supplementary and do not replace the need for a chemical disinfectant and friction to remove bioburden from the surface. Highlight is the only technology designed to empower people to disinfect surfaces with effective technique in real-time, every single time they use a disinfectant.

For over 20 years, the infection prevention community has been asking for colorized disinfection. The challenge was always in getting the color to last in the container at point-of-manufacture and then getting it to fade on the surface at point-of-use, and making sure that the color-fading is irreversible. We designed around this problem by creating a point-of-use additive: Highlight is combined with the disinfectant right before spraying or wiping, enabling us to have control over the intensity of the color and the accuracy of the color-fading time.

• Watch our demo video at: www.kinnos.us/highlight-powder and www.kinnos.us/highlight-wipes
• Numerous peer-reviewed publications have also demonstrated that Highlight quantitatively improves disinfection technique, is safe and does not reduce the efficacy of the original disinfectant, and that end-users qualitatively prefer Highlight over the status quo. Read our whitepapers here:
  • https://www.kinnos.us/whitepapers

Activity: Highlight is used by front-line workers and cleaning staff. Outputs: Staff do a more effective job of fully covering surfaces with disinfectant due to colorization and compliance with waiting contact times. Short term outcomes: Staff demonstrate adherence to best practices and improvements in disinfection technique can be quantified. Long term outcomes: More effective disinfection technique leads to reduction in infections and enables the general public to be more confident in public spaces.

Although Kinnos doesn’t publicly disclose customer numbers, our solution is used by leading first response and medical organizations like the Fire Department of New York. Within the next year, our goal is to touch the lives of 100,000 people who are interacting with colorized disinfection, and by year five, we hope to meaningfully impact at least 2 million people.

Kinnos' key goals for 2020 include the successful commercial launch of our Highlight Wipes technology for hospitals, systematizing Highlight's use in communities' responses to COVID-19 as towns, states, and countries re-open, and to expand our product platform for Highlight for other chemistries and form factors. In five years, the goal is for Highlight to be incorporated in most disinfection standard operating procedures in the US and beyond to ensure that everyone who wants to safely and successfully disinfect a surface can do so without human error.

Some of our challenges include: raising awareness that our solution exists given its novelty; exploring and prioritizing specific markets and use cases given the sudden and immense demand for disinfection across all verticals outside of our core focus on healthcare; and increasing our ability to rapidly expand our product platform given limited headcount and in-house resources.

To address awareness, we are looking for media partners to help profile use cases as well as engage with academic partners to quantify the impact of our work. With respect to market access and product development, we are actively engaging with potential strategic partners that 1) actively work with disinfectants in various markets, and/or 2) have in-house testing resources we can leverage.

11 full-time staff, 1 part-time

The Kinnos team is composed of seasoned chemists and technology experts, as well as sales leaders with decades of experience in the healthcare space. Our Advisory Board includes key opinion leaders in infection prevention, serial entrepreneurs, and industry veterans.

Kinnos, along with Save the Children, The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and WaterAid, has created a coalition called BASICS (Bold Action to Stop Infections in Clinical Settings). BASICS will transform healthcare and reduce healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) by at least 50% by preparing health systems in low-and middle-income countries for disease outbreaks using evidence-based practices to institutionalize infection prevention.

Kinnos is a B2B company where our customers are hospitals, first responders, NGOs, and other entities that are utilizing Highlight products on the front-lines of epidemic response. Customers purchase the physical goods of Highlight Powder or Highlight Wipes and utilize the technology in their disinfection protocols. By utilizing Highlight, Kinnos' customers minimize the human error common in disinfection practices and provide peace of mind that the surface is being properly disinfected

By selling our products, we aim to achieve profitability and become a self-sustaining business that can make a lasting impact on healthcare for generations.

Social impact innovation at the core of Solve, and this principle is shared by Kinnos. The company originated as a social impact endeavor by trying to answer the question: how do we better protect frontline healthcare workers who risked their lives to treat and save patients battling Ebola? And to continue making an impact beyond Ebola and COVID-19 for future health threats, we believe partnering with members of the Solve community will enable Kinnos to scale and deliver our products to more communities, especially those outside the US who have an immediate need for easy-to-use and safe disinfection solutions.  

We would be very interested in having conversations with Johnson and Johnson, Georgia Pacific Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Yum! Brands, and MacArthur Foundation.

The Kinnos team will leverage the Elevate Prize to drive a significant and sustained campaign in the US and beyond about the importance of surface disinfection, and how colorized disinfection technology can help healthcare and front-line workers protect themselves and others with efficient disinfection technology. Highlight is easy to use and able to deployed quickly, so The Elevate Prize would support broader and faster application of Highlight (r) technology in communities that need effective disinfection solutions. COVID19 has demonstrated the importance of effective disinfection, and the need for broader public awareness to understand the correct applications of disinfectant.