The wastewater management facilities and municipalities fight a constant battle monitoring the ever-growing pool of deadly pathogens. Adding to the woes, the latest SARS-CoV-2 has brought these utilities to the front and center of the war against the COVID-19 pandemic. In tackling the deadly pandemic, it pays to monitor whole communities proactively rather than test each person, which is time-consuming. However, for this, a non-invasive early-warning tool is needed in order to take appropriate remediation measures. Unfortunately, the current sampling techniques are complicated, sloppy, and expensive. And the investments for innovation in analysis have only started to pour in.

Turning the corner for wastewater treatment facilities is InnovaPrep, a visionary bio-surveillance company that believes in striving to support the healthy living of humans and animals. InnovaPrep offers automated pre-analytical solutions and sample preparation technologies for modern microbiology, specifically useful for monitoring waterborne pathogens. The company’s flagship solution The Concentrating Pipette (CP) Select is a small benchtop instrument that uses dead-end filtration on high-flow single-use pipette tips to capture target particles.

Many of its clients from the wastewater management facilities domain have confirmed that The CP Select rapidly and efficiently concentrates SARS-CoV-2 from raw influent wastewater samples. One public wastewater treatment plant—the treated wastewater of which is used to replenish an aquifer—in Virginia with a state-of-the-art microbiology laboratory compared InnovaPrep’s method against five other common sample concentration methods for the concentration of six viruses from 100 mL of raw influent. The CP Select outperformed the other methods including polyethylene glycol model and celite based methods. Further, the speed of concentration and the ease of use easily beat traditional methods. For secondary clarifier effluent, similar results were reported, and the InnovaPrep Large Volume Concentrator kit was used to process 100 liters, for secondary concentration using the CP Select. This powerful combination of techniques tremendously improved the detection limit for those viruses. This customer was one of the first in the US to report the outbreak of Coronavirus in wastewater in early March, even before clinical testing affirmed the presence of the deadly virus.