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

Untap正在应对我们这个时代最大的挑战之一，保护我们的社区免受感染。目前，只有当个人出现症状时才能检测到感染。通常，这是在传播已经发生之后。据估计，流感和诺如病毒在2019年使英国经济损失4%的生产力;造成数十亿英镑的收入损失，数百万人感染。污水监测是一个令人难以置信的工具。它是用来衡量一个社区的健康直接通过他们的集体污水。人类在感染的早期阶段就会排出病毒RNA，因此这可用于检测感染前症状和传播前。与参与率通常较低的侧向流测试不同，污水测试的覆盖面很广。然而，目前最先进的技术是人工收集污水并在实验室中进行分析。这种分析需要几天时间，每个样本的成本高达数千英镑。数据的成本和延迟阻碍了污水监测在当地范围内的开展。该项目将把我们的概念验证转化为产品，改进工程设计，使其适合长期现场部署，并与英国行业专家一起验证我们的数据。我们将为客户提供从硬件到客户仪表板的端到端解决方案。

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.