Testing wastewater samples is one of the primary methods for assessing infectious disease prevalence in populations. By collecting and testing samples from various water treatment plants, scientists can assess which areas have the highest infection rates.
In 2020, scientists in the laboratory of Zhugen Yang, PhD, a professor of biosensing and environmental health at Cranfield University, began working on rapid testing kits using paper-based devices that could be used to track COVID-19 and influenza infections via wastewater. Now the lab has published details of its origami-paper sensors in a paper published in Cell Reports Physical Science, titled, “Paper microfluidic sentinel sensors enable rapid and on-site wastewater surveillance in community settings.”
Yang and his team developed the method as part of a U.K. wastewater surveillance program. In 2021, he tested the sensors at four quarantine hotels around Heathrow Airport in London. It took under 90 minutes to go from sample to answer compared to the roughly four hours required for a PCR test in a centralized lab.
According to the paper, the portable platform detected “viruses at <20 copies RNA per reaction sample” and offered “similar or higher specificity and sensitivity for pathogen detection at a much lower cost” compared to more expensive and specialized PCR testing.
“During COVID-19 we proved that fast community sewage analysis is a really effective way to track infectious diseases and help manage public health,” Yang said. “The simple test we have developed costs just £1 ($1.33) and uses the commonly available camera function in a mobile phone, making it readily accessible. This could be a real game-changer when it comes to predicting disease rates and improving public health in the face of future pandemics.”
Further development of the test is being sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust Research Leadership Scheme and a grant from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. The researchers noted in the paper that their future research efforts will focus on “integrating concentration, extraction, detection, and analysis modules into a single device to standardize and automate wastewater monitoring to identify pathogens.”
They also have improvements planned to make the microfluidic device more amenable for use in low-resource settings. One improvement is that in the future “all the reagents will be lyophilized on paper, eliminating the need for refrigeration, thereby improving stability and portability of the reagents, which will facilitate the operational step,” the researchers wrote.
