When COVID-19 struck, Sergey Krylov, professor of chemistry at York University, saw more than a scientific challenge - he saw a call to action.
Through his work leading York's Technologies for Identification and Control of Infectious Diseases (TICID) cluster, Krylov has developed strategies and technologies that will transform how societies manage infectious disease threats.
Those efforts are inspired by learnings from the COVID-19 pandemic that have led him on a quest to find solutions and improvements to pandemic preparedness.
During the crisis, Krylov felt that while diagnostic self-testing at the general population level was essential, the infrastructure to support mass testing wasn't built to scale. "The response was not as one would ideally expect," says Krylov.
The science and technology were not the barrier, however. Self-administered rapid antigen tests emerged quickly and proved useful, but widespread availability came too late, says Krylov. The gap was in production, deployment and integration into public health networks. Supply chains were fragile, policies fragmented, regulatory processes slow and reimbursement strategies unclear. Even with vaccines available, limited data flow constrained public health responses.
Determined to do things differently, Krylov and colleagues launched the TICID cluster with funding from York's Catalyzing Interdisciplinary Research Clusters program. The interdisciplinary initiative brings together researchers from four Faculties, combining expertise across science, engineering, public health, business and policy. Its mission is to pair technological breakthroughs with policy insights to tackle complex challenges in pandemics and infectious disease threats.
The cluster has pursued interdisciplinary research funding and collaboration across institutions while supporting research coordination, seminars and integration of ideas across disciplines and fields.
Sergey Krylov
While preparing grant applications, Krylov realized the cluster needed a clear strategy document. That effort evolved into the policy-inquiry paper "A policy roadmap for sustainable mass-testing," recently published in Health Affairs Scholar.
Offering a framework for building sustainable, resilient testing infrastructure, the paper emphasizes coordinated policy, robust supply chains, scalable systems and public accessibility. Central to the argument is the need to improve the sensitivity of self-administered tests, making them reliable for both pandemic use and routine health applications. It argues that technological innovation must go hand-in-hand with coordinated policy and planning to ensure testing systems are resilient in future outbreaks and maintain public trust.
The work was personally significant for Krylov. Chemists rarely lead policy papers, he says, but he felt the potential impact demanded it. "We realized that without involving governments, we would not be able to solve the problem," he says.
He took first-author responsibility - guiding the ideas, writing and revisions - while drawing on insights from mathematicians, engineers, behavioural scientists, economists and other collaborators. The paper was co-authored by a team of York researchers across multiple disciplines, reflecting the cluster's collaborative foundation.
Since being published, the paper is available as a global resource. Krylov describes it as "non-competitive," a framework researchers worldwide can adopt as a free intellectual gift that they can use to advance new proposals for self-testing technologies.
Looking ahead, the cluster will adapt the framework for Canada's public health infrastructure. "We've built a framework that can guide global policy. Now we need to make sure it works for Canada - for our communities, our systems, our future," Krylov says.
As governments worldwide reassess pandemic preparedness, the paper offers a roadmap for testing systems that are adaptable, accessible and enduring, and provides policymakers with evidence-based data. Within the cluster, Krylov says researchers continue to develop novel diagnostic tools and infectious disease detection technologies.
This story was originally featured in YFile, York University's community newsletter.
