Product development and testing for robust, automated, onsite sewage surveillance for localised, broad-spectrum, early disease detection

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Untap is tackling one of the greatest challenges of our time, keeping our communities safe from infections.Currently infections are only detected when an individual presents symptoms. Often, this is after transmission has already occurred. Influenza and norovirus were estimated to cost the UK economy 4% productivity loss in 2019; accounting for GBP billions in lost revenue, and millions of infected individuals.Sewage surveillance is an incredible tool. It is used to measure the health of a community directly by their collective sewage. Humans shed viral RNA from early stages of infection, therefore this can be used to detect infection pre-symptoms, and pre-transmission. Unlike lateral flow tests, which often have low participation rates, sewage can provide broad coverage. However, the current state-of-the-art is manually collecting the sewage and analysing it in a laboratory. This analysis takes days, and costs up to GBP thousands per sample. The cost and delay to the data has prevented sewage surveillance being carried out at a local scale.This project will turn our proof of concept into a product, improving the engineered design to be suitable for long term field deployment, and validating our data against UK industry experts. We will provide an end-to-end solution for customers, from the hardware to the customer dashboard.