By Richard A. Rasansky, CEO, XCMR Inc. and board member, IUVA

Five years ago, I thought the hardest part of building a UV-C company would be the science. I was wrong.

The science unquestionably is complex. Developing meaningful UV-C solutions requires deep expertise in photobiology, aerosol science and exposure pathways; virology and microbiology; computational fluid dynamics and systems modeling; and the photonics, electronics and software that transform scientific understanding into technologies capable of solving real-world problems.

But science is only the admission ticket. Then comes the equally complex challenge of navigating the regulatory, standards and policy landscape that determines whether innovation ultimately can reach the people who need it.

Science asks what is possible. Engineering asks how to make it practical. Regulation and standards ask how it can be deployed safely and responsibly. The marketplace ultimately determines whether it achieves meaningful adoption. Each serves a different purpose, operates on a different timeline, follows different rules and measures success differently. Bringing those worlds together may be the greatest challenge facing entrepreneurs and innovators developing the next generation of infection prevention technologies.

What makes this challenge uniquely difficult is building confidence in something people cannot see, cannot easily measure and may never know made a difference.

For me, perhaps the greatest irony of working with UV-C is that almost everything that matters is invisible. The light itself is invisible. The microorganisms it inactivates are invisible. The infections prevented are invisible. Even success is measured by what never happened. That reality shapes every aspect of commercializing prevention.

Commercializing prevention fundamentally is different from commercializing most other technologies. If a new smartphone is faster, people notice. If software saves time, users experience the benefit almost immediately. Prevention offers no such luxury. How do you demonstrate the value of an infection that never occurred? How do you quantify confidence created by reducing risk? How do you build trust in outcomes that, by their very nature, cannot be directly observed? These questions have no simple answers, yet they define the future of our industry.

Over the past several years, I have come to believe that one of the greatest misconceptions about UV-C is that it is a single technology. It is not. UV-C is an enabling tool. Like any tool, its effectiveness entirely depends on how, where and why it is used. Different light sources, wavelengths, doses, exposure times, environmental conditions and biological targets all influence performance. Protecting a surgical wound fundamentally is different from disinfecting a patient room. Treating air inside an HVAC system presents different engineering and biological challenges than protecting the air someone breathes. Clearly, protecting a built environment and protecting the people within it are complementary objectives, but they are not the same problem. Yet, our industry customers often find themselves confronting the perception that all UV-C devices essentially are interchangeable. They are not.

This creates perhaps the industry’s greatest commercial challenge: educating customers that understanding the application matters every bit as much as understanding the technology itself. Unfortunately, education rarely fits neatly into a sales cycle, even though informed customers are essential to making sound purchasing decisions.

Another lesson from my journey is that scientific rigor and commercial success do not always move at the same pace. In every emerging industry, there is pressure to move quickly. Investors seek growth. Customers seek certainty. Companies seek differentiation. Yet infection prevention is inherently probabilistic. Laboratory efficacy does not translate automatically into operational effectiveness. Performance demonstrated under controlled conditions may not predict outcomes in complex, real-world environments. Markets reward simplicity. Biology rarely provides it.

Our industry will benefit by continuing to raise the standard for evidence. Commercial claims increasingly should be supported by meaningful scientific validation conducted under conditions that reflect how products actually are used and deployed. That approach may require more time and greater investment, but it ultimately builds confidence – not only in individual products, but also in the credibility of the entire industry and its technology.

Ironically, those companies investing most heavily in scientific validation often face the greatest commercial challenge. Demonstrating rigorous evidence takes time and resources, while bold commercial claims, which often are misleading, sometimes can reach the market much faster. Over the long term, however, I believe trust will become one of the most valuable differentiators our industry possesses.

Regulation presents its own complexities. While appropriately protecting public health demands high standards, innovators often find themselves navigating pathways that were not designed with emerging technologies in mind. Questions surrounding regulatory expectations, standards development, occupational safety and performance validation remain works in progress for many applications.

Organizations such as the EPA, FDA, OSHA, NIOSH, NIST and others in the broader scientific community each play essential roles in protecting public health and ensuring safety. Yet many emerging UV-C applications challenge existing regulatory frameworks because they do not fit neatly into historical categories. Innovators often are left navigating evolving or even unknown expectations while simultaneously advancing science, engineering, manufacturing and commercialization.

This is not simply a regulatory challenge. It is a commercialization challenge. Innovation typically advances faster than standards can evolve. Standards, appropriately, require consensus and evidence. Innovators, by contrast, must make decisions in real time. Bridging that gap requires greater collaboration between researchers, industry, regulators and policymakers so that innovation and public confidence can advance together.

Funding presents a similar paradox. Government support has been indispensable in helping many breakthrough technologies move from concept to early validation – innovations that might never have reached development otherwise. At the same time, although venture capital has been instrumental in scaling transformative companies, it often seeks timelines, business models and risk profiles that do not align naturally with deep-science, hardware-intensive technologies requiring extensive validation and regulatory engagement.

A lesson from this experience is that technologies which appear sufficiently mature to move beyond basic research funding still may carry commercial risks that remain too great for traditional venture investment.

Neither model is wrong. They simply optimize for different objectives, leaving many promising technologies stranded between those two worlds. Finding better ways to support companies during the challenging transition from scientific proof to commercial deployment may be one of the most important opportunities facing our innovation ecosystem. Too often, technologies demonstrating genuine technical promise struggle to cross the so-called “valley of death” between research and widespread adoption.

Perhaps the most important lesson from this journey is that technology alone does not save lives. Systems do. Ventilation, filtration, vaccination, diagnostics, hygiene, environmental design, personal protective equipment and UV each contribute differently to reducing risk.

The challenge is designing those systems so that each layer complements the others rather than competing with them. The future of infection prevention will not be built around one technology replacing another. It will be built by intelligently integrating complementary approaches based on evidence, context and measurable outcomes.

The objective should never be perfection. It should be meaningful risk reduction. Every day, society accepts interventions that reduce rather than eliminate risk. Seatbelts do not prevent every injury. Airbags do not prevent every fatality. Vaccines do not prevent every infection. We nevertheless embrace these technologies because they measurably improve outcomes. Infection prevention technologies deserve to be evaluated through the same lens.

Looking back, building a UV-C company has been one of the most intellectually demanding and professionally rewarding experiences of my career. It reinforced my respect for science, deepened my appreciation for interdisciplinary collaboration, and strengthened my conviction that solving complex public health challenges requires humility as much as innovation.

More importantly, it taught me that the future of prevention will not be determined solely by scientific breakthroughs. It will depend on our ability to build efficient communication and trust between disciplines, between researchers and entrepreneurs, between regulators and innovators, and ultimately between technology and the people it is intended to protect.

As our industry looks ahead, I hope we spend less time asking whether UV-C works in the abstract and more time asking where it works best, how it integrates with other protective strategies, how it improves current technology, how success should be measured and how we collectively generate the evidence needed to earn lasting confidence.

The future of UV-C will not be defined simply by the photons we generate. It will be defined by the confidence we build in the outcomes they help make possible.

That confidence must be grounded in rigorous science, earned through meaningful evidence and reinforced through thoughtful collaboration among researchers, innovators, regulators and end users. Only then can promising technologies transform into trusted tools that improve public health and strengthen our resilience against infectious disease, all while ensuring commercial and sustainable viability.