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As SARS-CoV-2 was spreading through his home country of China early this year, biomedical engineer Zhugen Yang realized that his expertise in both sensory technology and wastewater monitoring could be the perfect combination for helping to track COVID-19 outbreaks. Yang had previously created field-ready diagnostic assays for pathogens in bodily fluids (cow and human). He had also helped develop sensors for monitoring wastewater—initially for cocaine and methamphetamine, and then for sequences of human mitochondrial DNA, which can serve as biomarkers for various cancers. Now at Cranfield University in the UK, Yang decided he would develop an easy-to-use, low-cost test to check for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 at wastewater treatment plants.
In recent months, wastewater epidemiology—specifically, the idea of looking to sewage to detect and quantify infections in local populations—has become a popular approach for tracking the pandemic. Several studies suggest that SARS-CoV-2, while rarely released in ...
