I-Corps: Passive in situ pathogen concentration device for wastewater-based epidemiology

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of technology to enable effective surveillance of microorganisms for identifying threats to human health and the environment. The proposed technology may be used for wastewater surveillance to predict disease outbreaks and thus allow health agencies to deploy resources to contain a pathogen that can spread globally. The technology will be used in the design of non-invasive and safe sampling devices to assess the health of communities that contribute to wastewater. In the future, autonomous robots may be used to deploy such passive sampling devices at strategic locations within city sewer networks to allow finer geographical resolution of pathogen prevalence and spread. Implementing the technology at locations such as hospitals may enable the monitoring of antibiotic resistant genes in bacteria causing hospital-acquired infections that are hard to treat. In addition, climate change can affect the microbial load and diversity in natural water bodies. Sampling devices may be deployed in natural water sources or even public pools to monitor microbial populations. Using a similar strategy, emerging pathogens such as bird flu may be monitored by sampling wastewater from farms or zoos. This may reduce the threat resulting from anthropogenic factors such as global travel and climate change. This I-Corps project is based on the development of a passive sampling device that may be directly deployed at a water source to concentrate microorganisms. The technology was originally developed to overcome several shortcomings of traditional wastewater sampling and virus concentration methods. It uses a solid substrate to capture and concentrate microorganisms from water sources. Proprietary solutions efficiently extract genetic material (DNA or RNA) from the captured microorganisms. Preliminary results demonstrated that viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 and Influenza may be concentrated successfully to extract their genetic material. The technology will be further used to construct passive sampling devices that continuously and safely capture microorganisms while deployed at a water source. This minimizes the cost, time, and effort to transport and process potentially hazardous wastewater. Weighing less than 20 g, these devices may be deployed in water sources such as wastewater treatment plants, building-level pipes, or even aircraft lavatories when more granular surveillance of disease outbreaks is required. Further experiments will be conducted to test the efficiency of the devices in concentrating different species of microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.