Sewage-based surveillance of new potential zoonotic viruses that could cause future pandemics

The possibilities of extending this monitoring to lots of other pathogens is something we want to look into in this project. We are working closely with a company called AplexBIO, which has developed a method that in just 4 hours can map more than 100 different pathogens in a sample with high sensitivity. We now want to evaluate and validate this method in wastewater and patient samples in Uganda.

About the project

We also want to find out which viruses cause severe febrile illness in people in Uganda. Using samples collected through surveillance systems over many years, we will map viruses using our new methods.

Thanks to sequencing techniques and advanced data analysis, we now have unique opportunities to detect and investigate viruses. We have long experience of working on similar method development and application to samples from ticks and cattle, among others.

The method involves capturing the viruses present in the sample as efficiently as possible and then analysing the composition of their genes in detail. In the next step, we compare our findings with a database containing all known viruses to date, to see if there are any genes in the sample that are similar to viruses.

We hope that the project will create the conditions to quickly identify, on the ground in Uganda, new potential zoonotic viruses that could cause future pandemics.