This technology is a wastewater surveillance system for SARS-CoV-2 that can be used to screen communities for viral load and new variants.
Although there are accurate diagnostic assays for the detection of SARS-CoV-2, challenges remain when determining the level of community spread and the presence of new variants. Viral genome sequencing of clinical samples is the current gold standard, but reliability of community spread tracking can vary greatly depending on the proportion of samples collected within a population.
This wastewater surveillance system screens for the level of viral debris to help determine severity and type of outbreaks. The desired virus is concentrated from wastewater samples, which is followed by viral RNA extraction, RT-qPCR, next-generation sequencing. Bioinformatics pipelines can be used to detect amino acid mutations characteristic of specific viral variants. This method of wastewater-based epidemiology and high-throughput sequencing can be used to efficiently illuminate community spread, and inform public health policies.
This technology has been validated with wastewater samples from New York City and New Jersey.
IR CU23120
Licensing Contact: Dovina Qu