Last April 13, as an ambulance sped him to the hospital, Monzer Hourani overheard the emergency medical technicians say they didn’t think he was going to make it. Immediately, the 77-year-old medical-building developer started praying: “God, give me time to finish this.”

 

Hourani had just begun his war against COVID-19, and he needed more time to develop his weapon, an air filter technology that annihilates coronavirus and other airborne germs.

 

Called the Biodefense Indoor Air Protection System and launched last August, Hourani’s brainchild is a proprietary souped-up HEPA filter. Unlike ordinary HEPA filters that trap but do not kill airborne pathogens, the Hourani filter, with its layers of hyper-heated nickel foam mesh, traps and zaps a whopping 99.999% of the coronavirus, with only trace increases in ambient air temperature.

Hourani financed IVP with “millions of dollars” of his own personal fortune.

 

IVP’s small but growing army of virus slayers agree that the technology is more than a weapon against COVID-19. The filter raises the overall standard for indoor air quality, they chorus. And it doubles as a hedge against future scourges because it also kills coronavirus variants, other viruses, allergens and bacteria such as legionella. The filter even zaps 99.8% of anthrax spores, according to test results from the Galveston National Laboratory, which ran the unprecedented live-virus tests on the filter’s prototype.