09/09/2025
Ottawa, Ontario — Tuesday September 9, 2025
During the COVID-19 pandemic, wastewater surveillance (WWS) became a powerful tool used by public health agencies to monitor the levels of COVID-19 in the community. Now, WWS has the potential to be applied more broadly, and new monitoring platforms are needed to meet the resource requirements of expanded sampling programs.
A new study led by Tyson Graber, explores the use of a Nanostring nCounter System (NNS) to provide WWS data compared with the gold-standard Nucleic Acid Amplification testing (NAAT) platforms.
The results showed that a NNS can successfully quantify biomarker targets of interest for public health monitoring but has a lower sensitivity and a longer processing time compared with NAAT.
“The Nanostring nCounter System offers high multiplexing and sample throughput and user-friendly operation and assay development with minimal hands-on time” said Graber, Associate Scientist at the CHEO RI. “Due to its lower sensitivity, the platform is less effective for early warning detection, but its ease of use and resource efficiency are advantages in broader surveillance applications.”
NNS has a role to play in expanding WWS program capacity and has the potential to be a useful tool for reporting on a variety of biomarkers.