PI: Kristen Jellison
Co-PI(s): Vassie Ware
University: Lehigh University
Industry partner: City of Bethlehem Wastewater Treatment Plant
Wastewater-based epidemiology has become a growing field of inquiry since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While wastewater surveillance provides early detection of COVID-19 transmission in communities, the current methodology (wastewater concentration, RNA extraction, and quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR)) is expensive and time-consuming, requires access to laboratory equipment, and leaves samples vulnerable to RNA degradation the longer they are stored prior to analysis in a laboratory. There is an immediate, unmet need for accessible, affordable, and mobile platforms capable of providing fast and reliable detection at the point of sampling to serve as a true early warning, with time to intervene prior to a community outbreak. To this end, we will develop an ultrasensitive hyperspectral sensor for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater, with inherent modularity to ensure that the technology can be easily adapted to test for emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2 as well as other viral and bacterial respiratory pathogens. Our goal is to apply this RNA-based testing platform to wastewater monitoring to increase the number of pathogens under surveillance and decrease the time from sample collection to results. The proposed work will investigate the performance of this hyperspectral sensor compared to the current qRT-PCR methodology and specifically investigate the sensitivity and specificity of SARS-CoV-2 detection in spiked laboratory water and wastewater, the impact of wastewater quality on SARS-CoV-2 detection, and the relationship between community COVID-19 cases with SARS-CoV-2 detection in wastewater. The enhanced community-level surveillance for infectious disease transmission enabled by this new technology will not only facilitate better preparedness for the next global pandemic but will also help alleviate disparities in public health outcomes due to unequal access to healthcare in underserved populations.