Piloting early warning
Putting our research into practice by building a functional detection system
Learning by doing
Building on our research evaluating different biosurveillance approaches, the NAO is beginning a North American pilot program to test our pathogen detection approach. Building and operating a real-time detection system will allow us to validate our findings and fine-tune our methodologies under realistic conditions.
Wastewater and nasal swabs
This pilot integrates two of the monitoring approaches we've been studying: deep short-read sequencing of municipal wastewater and shallower long-read sequencing of pooled nasal swabs. Wastewater offers broad population coverage, while pooled swabs offer higher quality nucleic acids and higher human viral concentrations.
Iterative refinement
We're focused on establishing an end-to-end system, from sample collection and processing to bioinformatic analysis and threat characterization. As the pilot progresses we will continually incorporate new research findings, analytical techniques, and expanded sampling regimes to enhance our monitoring coverage incrementally. This iterative strategy allows us to rapidly build operational capability while progressively broadening the program’s scope.