Todos Medical, Ltd., a medical diagnostics and related solutions company, has announced that its CLIA/CAP-certified laboratory Provista Diagnostics has initiated a validation plan for PCR-based polio testing. The Company intends to validate multiple PCR polio assays, including wastewater testing with ultra-high sensitivity. Low viral load diagnostic tests will be developed for early diagnosis and will be available for multiplexing with our other PCR panels.

The global bioinformatics market was valued at $13.2 billion in 2021 according to Precedence Research and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 16.3% to $45.6 billion by 2030. This market includes data management and production, data warehousing, and data mining for life sciences, academia, and applied testing. A much smaller subset of this market is wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) which surveils large population clusters in an unobtrusive manner. The routine testing can be used to capture data on underreported viral illnesses, enabling the early detection of pathogens in a community. There are 58 countries gathering this data in order to enact policy decisions. During the COVID-19 surges, wastewater patterns were analyzed and became predictive of the subsequent outbreaks. The average site typically screens weekly or twice weekly and gets reimbursed up to $940 per site per week according to some recent awards from the CDC. 
  
“Wastewater surveillance has become a powerful tool that needs to be implemented systematically nationwide now that COVID, monkeypox, and polio are circulating in the United States,” says Gerald E. Commissiong, president & CEO of Todos Medical. “Surveillance testing is an essential tool in controlling the community spread of these emerging viral pathogens. The lack of funding support for widespread testing makes wastewater surveillance our first line of defense in the detection of outbreaks. Given the tremendous value of wastewater testing data, policymakers could use it to enact COVID mitigation efforts, therefore we felt it was important for us to be able to offer this service to our emerging customer base for our Long COVID, UTI, respiratory, GI, wound and STD PCR panels.”