We are establishing a new research center to test municipal wastewater for pathogens and chemicals and make the data available to the public and other potential stakeholders. Our facility will act as an intelligence unit to track and prevent disease outbreaks in their early stages. We have started frequently sampling and analyzing wastewater from the 4 MLD sewage treatment unit on the IIT Madras campus since 2022. However, we aim to extend our wastewater surveillance capabilities to Chennai metropolitan and other parts of India and develop an online national health monitoring dashboard.

The study is performed by analyzing biological and chemical human urinary biomarkers in wastewater. In brief, wastewater is collected, processed, and analyzed on analytical instruments to get raw data. Wastewater-derived data are analyzed, processed, and made publicly available through an online interactive real-time dashboard. We recently created an online dashboard to track SARS-CoV-2 viruses circulating in IIT Madras communities. Please click below to access our online dashboard.

The WBE tool will also track population exposure to pollutants, pesticides, licit and illicit drugs, and personal care products. We are also interested in detecting and monitoring antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes, which are of immediate concern due to excessive consumption of antibiotics. We will work on building a hydro-informatics platform for cities with the help of appropriate modelling tools to give spatiotemporal information on the data derived from the WBE study.

Our data will warn policymakers, health practitioners, public health officials, and the public of potential public health threats and help them prepare for the pandemic.

We plan to set up a genome sequencing facility and bioinformatics platform to identify variants of concern circulating in communities.

The new center at IIT Madras will tackle the need to evaluate public health in real time and effectively predict and monitor future COVID-19-like pandemics.