Rapid monitoring of community heath through wastewater surveillance

This technology is a wastewater surveillance system for SARS-CoV-2 that can be used to screen communities for viral load and new variants.

Unmet Need: Viral genome sequencing of wastewater samples for community-level disease monitoring

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.

The Technology: Viral wastewater surveillance system for public health focused disease monitoring

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.

Applications:

• Viral pathogen monitoring
• Public health monitoring through uro-fecal streams
• Community screening
• Variant detection
• Outbreak prediction
• Research model to study viral variant diversity

Advantages:

• High-throughput platform for disease screening
• Detection of proportion of multiple variants in population
• Prediction of community spread of current and emerging variants
• Cost-effective as a public health measure

Lead Inventor:

Kartik Chandran, Ph.D.

Related Publications:

• Archana A, Long C, Chandran K. "NYC Metropolitan Wastewater Reveals Links between Sars-Cov-2 Amino Acid Mutations and Disease Outcomes" SSRN. 2023 Mar 3.

• Archana A, Long C, Chandran K. "Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 amino acid mutations in New York City Metropolitan wastewater (2020-2022) reveals multiple traits with human health implications across the genome and environment-specific distinctions" medRxiv. 2022 Jul 17.

• Lu H, Chandran K, Stensel D. "Microbial ecology of denitrification in biological wastewater treatment" Water Res. 2014 Nov 1; 64:237-254.

Tech Ventures Reference:

• IR CU23120

• Licensing Contact: Dovina Qu