Chargeurs & Noble Biomaterials to make PPE for healthcare

April 06, 2020 - United States Of America

Chargeurs and Noble Biomaterials have launched a strategic collaboration to produce urgently needed personal protective equipment (PPE) for the healthcare industry. Amid shortages of medical-grade equipment such as face masks and gowns, the two companies are working to enable Chargeurs to manufacture PPE using Noble Biomaterials’ silver-based technologies.

Chargeurs is well known as the leading global provider of interlinings, the technical components that give garments their shape and structure. In France, parent company Chargeurs has already begun producing hydro-alcoholic solutions for healthcare professionals and mission-critical sectors as well as producing and importing protective masks in industrial quantities.

The company has set a target of producing more than one million face masks a week within coming days. Chargeurs’ textile innovation laboratories in France, Asia, and the US will also be developing new prototypes of masks that can be mass produced to meet current health and safety requirements and to keep pace with changing needs over the long term, the company said in a media statement.

Noble Biomaterials has decades of experience supplying advanced materials to the healthcare market. The company’s X-Static technology is already used in infection-prevention textiles to reduce the growth of microbes and protect soft surfaces such as privacy curtains, bedding, scrubs and lab coats.

Noble Biomaterials is a registered FDA medical device facility, an essential sole-source technology supplier of medical components to the US Military and a US EPA–registered antimicrobial manufacturer. Leading companies such as 3M, Systagenix, and KCI rely on the products manufactured by Noble Biomaterials for the medical market. X-Static is made by bonding high-purity silver to the surface of a polymer, making it permanent for the life of the product. It is also Oeko-Tex standard 100 certified.

“We use only the best materials for the couture customers that we service out of our Paris manufacturing facility. As we quickly pivot from fashion to healthcare in order to help alleviate the shortage around the globe, we also want to ensure we’re making products using the best materials available. Noble Biomaterials has long supplied critical antimicrobial components to the healthcare and military sectors, and we’re pleased to work with the company to make high-quality products for those on the frontline of the healthcare fight,” Angela Chan, managing director and president, worldwide, of Chargeurs said.

“Multiple studies have shown that soft surfaces in the healthcare and community environments are contaminated and that cross-contamination from soft surfaces occurs frequently. Our technology has been clinically proven to reduce microbes and protect the surface of textiles, and with Chargeurs we’ll be able to help provide more critical PPE to healthcare employees around the globe. This is right in our wheelhouse—we’ve already begun prototyping these products, and we couldn’t be prouder to help in this worldwide fight,” said Jeff Keane, CEO of Noble Biomaterials said.