New efforts that are currently underway are attempting to leverage waste water surveillance data to monitor status and predict near term direction of pathogen outbreaks via linking it to patient data based on hospital observations. The overall goal is to identify potential pathogens, the related infection status in the population, and to possibly even predict resurgence of a previously identified pathogen via comparison of sequencing data from hundreds of patients to pathogen detection in a broad sampling of waste water across a given area. This panel which includes public health officers, epidemiologists, and research scientists will focus their debate of this timely subject on what promise and predictive value this approach may hold.
Session Chair Profile
M.D., Ph.D., Professor, Laboratory Medicine and Medicine/Infectious Diseases, UCSF
Biography
Charles Chiu, M.D./Ph.D. is a Professor at UCSF, Director of the UCSF-Abbott Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center (VDDC), and Associate Director of the UCSF Clinical Microbiology Laboratory. Chiu currently leads a translational research laboratory focused on clinical metagenomic sequencing assay development for infectious diseases and genomic investigation and surveillance of emerging pathogens, including the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. He also uses RNA-Seq transcriptome profiling to develop predictive models using machine learning for host response-based diagnosis of COVID-19 and other infections. Chiu’s work is supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Defense, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), philanthropy, and the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications (>20 on COVID-19), holds over 15 patents and patent applications, and serves on the scientific advisory board for Mammoth Biosciences, Danaher Dx, Biomesense, and Flightpath.
Speaker Profile
Ph.D., National Wastewater Surveillance System Program Lead, CDC
Biography
Dr. Amy Kirby is an Environmental Microbiologist in the Waterborne Disease Prevention Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She has a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture from the University of Georgia, a PhD in Microbiology from the University of Buffalo, SUNY, and a Master of Public Health in Epidemiology from Emory University. At CDC, Dr. Kirby is interested in leveraging environmental microbiology methods to measure pathogens, antibiotic resistance genes, and other health indicators in natural and man-made water systems.
