Prototyping and Deploying Air and Surface Virus Monitoring Point-of-Need Technologies to Improve Remediation Responses and Minimize Economic Losses of Viral Outbreaks

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This project expands on a partnership between York U and Sixth Wave Inc. (SIXW). It brings in new partners like Poppy Inc., BluMetric Env. Inc. (BME), Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) and Health Canada (HC) to leverage their expertise in development and validation of environmental biosensors. Goals: 1) develop two low-cost biosensors for sensitive virus monitoring in air and on surfaces; 2) deploy the biosensors to end-user labs; and 3) assess technology adoption and economical benefits by partners. Project objectives are to partner with SIXW and Poppy to prototype a portable fluorometric (Obj. 1) and an electric (Obj. 2) biosensor for air and surface virus detection (Goal 1) by pursuing these Activities: 1) Package the biosensors with portable air sampler, pump, electric and microscopy modules; 2) Parametrically study and optimize the portable biosensors; 3) Determine their performance characteristics in-lab. Obj. 3 is to deploy the biosensors for virus detection in real samples, on-site (Goal 2). Activities include: 1) Transfer the two biosensors to HC, CFIA, BME, etc. and optimize them to work with real air- and surface-virus samples; 2) Train partner personnel to use the biosensors and co-perform validation studies. Obj. 4 is to understand barriers to adoption to maximize economic and societal benefits of the biosensors (Goal 3) by pursuing the following Activities: 1) Identify and quantify short- and long-term economic and societal net benefits of biosensors; 2) Identify and assess barriers to adoption.The project enables co-developers to bring two biosensors to the market after understanding user barriers to adoption, and help co-validators achieve rapid environmental monitoring to make effective remediation actions and decisions during virus spreads. New knowledge about molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) and their affinity to viruses will be developed by training 6 undergraduate, 2 Master of Science, and 2 doctoral students as well as 2 postdoctoral fellows, in the biotechnology sector. They will disseminate patents and scientific articles while applying for future grants and acquiring/creating jobs to commercialize their technologies.