When Zeynep “Z” Ekemen, founder of Silver Defender, looked at how healthcare facilities addressed surface contamination, she identified a gap that standard cleaning protocols were never designed to close. Cleaning, she said, is a moment in time—and the moment a surface is touched, it is recontaminated immediately.

That observation drove Ekemen to develop what she calls surface intelligence technology: a continuous antimicrobial shield applied to high-touch surfaces that works in the background, suppressing pathogens between cleaning cycles.

“Cleaning removes the contamination and Silver Defender prevents it from coming back so quickly,” Ekemen said.

Silver Defender is a first-time sponsor of the Healthcare Surfaces Summit, set for May 5-6, 2026, at ISSA headquarters. The event brings together infection prevention specialists, environmental services professionals, and operations leaders—precisely the audience Ekemen said she needs to reach.

A fit for the summit’s focus on validation

This year’s Healthcare Surfaces Summit is organized around the themes of surface innovation and surface intelligence—concepts that map directly to what Silver Defender offers.

“When I saw ‘Surface Intelligence,’ that’s actually one of the trademarks that we use,” Ekemen said. “We literally fit into exactly what the summit is about.”

Linda Lybert, executive director of the Healthcare Surfaces Institute, a division of ISSA, said the product addresses a real and ongoing challenge in healthcare environments.

“It is one of those solutions that helps minimize the amount of bio burden on a surface in between cleaning,” Lybert said. “And therefore, when someone cleans, they’re more successful because there’s not as much bio burden on the surface material.”

Lybert noted that Silver Defender is not intended to replace disinfectants but to work alongside existing cleaning and disinfection protocols—providing an additional layer of protection that supports what those protocols accomplish.

New data, and a teaser for summit attendees

The summit will be the setting for what Ekemen described as significant new performance data from Silver Defender’s R&D team. The company had previously documented a three-log reduction against C. difficile—an already notable result for a continuous antimicrobial product. But Ekemen said the latest findings go further.

“The numbers show that it has beat any other historical data for a product of its kind,” she said, declining to share specifics ahead of the summit presentation. “We’re proving that some of the most difficult pathogens in the world can now be actively suppressed in the background without changing human behavior.”

The summit’s format—designed around small group collaboration rather than large-scale conference presentations—gives Silver Defender direct access to the decision-makers who matter most.

“The summit is going to give us the opportunity to speak directly to infection prevention, EVS, and operations at the same time, aligning all the departments together,” Ekemen said. “We won’t get that opportunity anywhere else to get all the decision makers in the same room to share this exciting news.”

Advocacy and EPA validation on the horizon

The summit may also mark the beginning of a broader regulatory push. Ekemen and Lybert discussed the possibility of forming a new task force focused on advocacy—one that would work with ISSA’s director of advocacy, John Nordoff, to encourage the EPA to develop standardized testing methods that can validate and verify the performance of continuous antimicrobial products.

Lybert said the Healthcare Surfaces Institute is already engaged on that front, with an existing task force reviewing products and evaluating data to support informed purchasing decisions by healthcare professionals.

“In healthcare, good enough is just not an option,” Lybert said. “The summit is all about validation.”

Limited seating remains

The Healthcare Surfaces Summit intentionally limits attendance to 120 participants to preserve the collaborative, task-force-driven format that defines the event. As of publication, more than half of the available spots have been filled. Registration is open now at the Healthcare Surfaces Summit website.

Register here and save your spot!