Various solutions for disinfecting masks or increasing the supply are in the works, but a new silicone mask now in development is designed to be used and sterilized repeatedly, and could be as effective as the gold standard of an N95 respirator. The mask can be easily cleaned after each use, so it could help solve supply issues. And it’s clear, which could help with communication. “When the virus started popping up in the U.S., we talked about the need for PPE, and identified really early on that there was going to be a large deficit within the United States as well as the world,” says James Byrne, a radiation oncologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and research affiliate at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research who is part of a multidisciplinary team developing the new mask. “We really put our heads together to try to come up with something that was sustainable, and that’s how we really came up with this reusable, scalable, conformable, flexible mask.”