WastewaterSCAN is a national effort to monitor diseases through municipal wastewater systems using consistent, sensitive methods to inform public health responses locally and nationally. Dr. Wolfe is a principal investigator for the WastewaterSCAN effort along with Ali Boehm at Stanford University. The team includes Verily as a laboratory and implementation partner, and local wastewater and public health officials partner to produce useful data about COVID-19, monkeypox, and other pathogens. More information about the program is available at www.wastewaterscan.org

Dr. Wolfe is a principal investor for the Sewer Coronavirus Alert Network (SCAN), a project that conducts daily monitoring across wastewater treatment plants in Northern and Central California for SARS-CoV-2, it’s variants, and extending into other viruses. This joint research and monitoring project provides daily data to public health officials while continuing to develop sensitive, scalable approaches to wastewater monitoring.

(image from biorender.com)

In collaboration with Ceres Nanosciences and with funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Wolfe Lab and the Moe/Liu Labs are monitoring wastewater throughout the city of Atlanta for SARS-CoV-2, looking not only at samples from wastewater treatment plants, but from manholes around the city that provide information about smaller geographic areas to guide targeted COVID-19 response efforts.

With support from the Rockefeller Foundation and in collaboration with Dr. Christine Moe at Emory and icddr,b in Bangladesh, these projects focus on utilizing wastewater monitoring in more informal wastewater networks in multiple settings around the world. The team is also working on developing testing approaches for additional pathogens that are of concern outside of the United States.