Wastewater provides a unique intelligence source for pathogen detection that is currently under exploited
Mountain View, CA (January 22, 2025) COVID-19 reaffirmed a long-standing concern among public health officials that the spread of pandemic pathogens exposes biosecurity vulnerabilities. The most widely deployed capabilities for pathogen detection in wastewater are various polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technologies, which have proven to be resource-efficient leading indicators of community outbreaks and seasonal surges. Unfortunately, PCR technologies are fundamentally targeted: they only work if we know what we’re looking for. The Defense Innovation Unit’s (DIU’s) ANTIDOTE project is focused to identify pathogens using wastewater and extend lessons learned from advanced developers, demonstrating a commercial system capable of finding any biothreat, whether known or unknown, or even novel or engineered.
“We received an urgent mandate to develop an integrated early warning capability in response, as described in the 2023 Biodefense Posture Review. This is a multifaceted effort and we have already tasked our internal teams heavily,” said Christina Laposa, UNDERSTAND Portfolio Manager, Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Chemical and Biological Defense. “We have seen the DIU team execute a number of other projects so we had confidence they had the team, flexibility, and tools to execute on this, despite the very aggressive timeline. I think we’re going to see some great developments come out of this early action.”
The Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Chemical and Biological Defense, and the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical Biological Radiological and Nuclear Defense (JPEO-CBRND) are is partnering with DIU on this project to find ways to improve both its situational awareness and ability to interpret and visualize data in a meaningful way for decision makers tasked with the biosecurity implications of future pandemics.
Christian Whitchurch (DIU) and Dan McCormick (JPEO CBRND) discuss CONOPS for advanced wastewater surveillance at Beholder’s Gaze 2024. Systems of all three performers visible in the background.
One way that this may be able to be solved is through wastewater. Throughout the pandemic, wastewater systems matured rapidly to meet the commercial and government customer demand for solutions that can predict, test, and provide policy or countermeasure solutions. DIU, in coordination with Chemical and Biological Defense leadership, launched the ANTIDOTE project to leverage commercial technology to implement a biosecurity solution, focused on monitoring and predicting potential threats.
These commercial technologies that were developed have helped to support and enable workflows that rapidly and continuously monitor wastewater and other novel data sources on a global scale, including the Indo-Pacific region.
To enable DoD’s use of these commercial solutions, DIU awarded contracts to three companies: Embleema, the Public Health Company, and RTX-BBN. Embleema’s HIVE platform is the only software with the Authorization to Operate (ATO) for analyzing genomic data in the FDA regulatory review environment and has been used by the FDA for regulatory decisions since 2013. PHC’s Pharos platform combines expert intelligence with data to provide early warnings and recommendations for biorisks such as infectious diseases like winter respiratory viruses, Ebola viruses and stomach flu. RTX-BBN’s FAST-NA is a unique solution that covers all threats on the IGSC list, which includes those on the U.S. Commerce Control List and all human, animal, and plant pathogens on the Australia Group Control List.
In October 2024, JPEO-CBRND and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency hosted the Beholder’s Gaze Exercise, which provided a critical platform for the three companies to showcase their capabilities and meet the three milestones set for the challenge. First, they have demonstrated the ability to ingest genomic data and return analytical results. Second, they demonstrated the ability to report results on Chemical-Biological Defense networks. Third, they have successfully accomplished an independent verification and validation exercise in a remote, disconnected environment.
“The commercial sector is well ahead of Defense in this area, with several companies supporting many communities, demonstrating that wastewater can provide indicators of infectious disease outbreaks,” CDR Niels Olson, Pathologist, U.S. Navy, DIU Chief Medical Officer. “Wastewater analysis has been shown to be cost efficient compared to other options, and commercial companies have demonstrated that they can quickly pivot to include new threats in their analytical panels.”
These prototype systems use algorithms and supporting libraries to provide a hardware agnostic capability to monitor known threats as well as new variants and unknown pathogens in communities and specific high-value locations. The data from wastewater monitoring can be visualized locally and integrated with other datasets, and gracefully degrade from a fully networked system to a completely offline state running in stand-alone mode.