Canadian PI: Dr. Richa Pandey
Canadian Institution: University of Calgary
Indian PI: Dr. Siddharth Tallur
Indian Institution: Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay
Project Summary:
Whilst limiting close human contact and social activity were highly effective in reducing transmission levels of virus outbreaks before vaccines were widely available, these measures were difficult to meaningfully implement. Instead of conducting large-scale human testing to support contact tracing and containment of cases, testing wastewater for the presence of pathogen nucleotides could be used as a surveillance tool to identify hot spots and outbreaks in a cost-effective manner. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the application of wastewater epidemiology has been widely reported for poliovirus, and recently several countries have reported recent polio outbreaks and re-emergence of poliovirus including the UK and US. There is also interest to sift through Canadian sewage to test for monkeypox, polio, and other potential health threats. Wastewater epidemiology is also especially important in India for polio to counter the threat of importation of the wild poliovirus (WPV) and/or vaccine-derived polioviruses (VDPV) from countries that have recently reported cases. Gold standard qPCR-based techniques for wastewater epidemiology implemented in many countries since the onset of COVID-19, including Canada and India, possibly divert resources away from human diagnostic testing, which is time-consuming and requires expensive laboratory instrumentation. Therefore, cost-effective and rapid alternative approaches are required to support wastewater epidemiology. In response to this challenge, we will develop a simple-to-use, rapid, and cost-effective wastewater analysis system to study the epidemiology of current and future outbreaks.
The novelty of this research stems from 1) integrating a new nucleic acid-based electrochemical assay for multiplexed detection of two wastewater-borne viruses (rotavirus and poliovirus) and 2) an automated sample processing and PCR system for self-aligned operation for rapid turnaround. The major impacts enabled by this collaborative project are: a) Enabling public health officials to monitor smaller communities non-invasively without depending on individuals who are experiencing symptoms to come forward and report them, b) Closely monitoring populations at greater risk for disease outbreaks, such as those in remote and congregate living facilities, c) Advanced capabilities for determining variants that are emerging to dominate based on wastewater samples.
