Professor Mark Servos from the department of biology and Professor Emeritus Gary Dmitrienko from the department of chemistry have been awarded research infrastructure grants to support their COVID-19 research.
Mark
Servos has
been
awarded
$314K
of
funding,
which
will
be
used
towards
his
project
in
wastewater
surveillance
of
SARS-Cov-2,
to
support
the
public
health
assessment
of
community
infection.
The signal of viral fragments in wastewater (measured using polymerase chain reactions, PCR) can be strongly correlated to the reported positive tests or hospitalizations in the corresponding population (sewer-shed). This can be an additional tool to monitortrends in communities and inform public health actions that are not influenced by the same biases in human health testing (e.g. non-symptomatic cases, etc.).
These projects were two of 79 total projects at 52 institutions across Canada. The Exceptional funding of almost $28 million was announced today through the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s Exceptional Opportunities Fund by the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry.
“Canadian researchers and scientists are helping to protect our health and safety and are key to finding our way out of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Navdeep Bains, the minister of innovation, science and industry, said in a media release.
Marks project is one of three at the University of Waterloo selected for funding.