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Ceres will collaborate with Emory University's multidisciplinary team of scientists to create and implement a wastewater-based COVID-19 surveillance system in the metro-Atlanta region, with a focus on use cases for underserved and vulnerable communities such as correctional facilities, low-income neighborhoods, and long-term care facilities.
FREMONT, CA: Ceres Nanosciences (Ceres), a privately held company that makes innovative products to improve diagnostic testing, has declared that it has been awarded a contract from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADxSM) Initiative for $8.2 million to support the development and implementation of wastewater-based surveillance systems for COVID-19 powered by the Nanotrap® particle technology in a network of sites with a focus on vulnerable and underserved populations.
While wastewater surveillance may assist communities in monitoring spatial and temporal trends in SARS-CoV-2 infection at the population level, widespread implementation has been hampered by the lack of a responsive, rapid, high-throughput viral concentration system. Nanotrap® Magnetic Virus Particles meet this need by trapping and concentrating viruses directly from raw sewage prior to RNA extraction and detection, and they can be easily modified for both small-scale and large-scale surveillance systems.
Ceres will collaborate with Emory University's multidisciplinary team of scientists to create and implement a wastewater-based COVID-19 surveillance system in the metro-Atlanta region, with a focus on use cases for underserved and vulnerable communities such as correctional facilities, low-income neighborhoods, and long-term care facilities.
"This collaboration between Ceres and Emory will generate robust evidence to support the CDC's objective of developing a national wastewater surveillance system that meets the information needs of city, county, and state decision-makers to effectively respond to the COVID-19 pandemic across multiple use cases in underserved community settings," stated Christine Moe, Eugene J. Gangarosa Chair in Safe Water and Sanitation at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University.
Ceres will identify and launch a network of centers of excellence for high-throughput wastewater-based COVID-19 surveillance at the same time.
