Wastewater epidemiology became a useful tool during the Covid pandemic. It could become big business if companies can track disease outbreaks and drug-use spikes — and one day predict them. Mariana Matus is co-founder and CEO of Biobot Analytics, a Cambridge, Mass.-based start-up trying to figure out how to make money analyzing sewage. Erin spoke with Matus about Biobot’s technology. The interview is edited for length and clarity. You were analyzing sewage in 2017, before it was popular. Tell me about how you got started. At the time, the number-one public health priority for the U.S. was tackling the opioid epidemic. We decided to create a product to look at prescription opioids and illicit substances, as well as medication-assisted treatments like buprenorphine or suboxone as a way to surface intelligence as to the type of supply or problem that a community has, as well as the level of treatment it already has. Then Covid-19 hit. We saw the opportunity to demonstrate that our wastewater platform is quick and versatile and can adapt to public health priorities. In February 2020, we decided to build a Covid-19 product. And then it exploded. People embraced the concept that there’s value in waste. It’s one thing to pinpoint an outbreak that’s already happened. But what about predicting outbreaks? It’s still early days, but I think that’s where we’re going. The first positive detections of SARS-CoV-2 in Massachusetts in Boston-area wastewater happened before the first clinical case of Covid was confirmed in the states. With mpox, we’re already seeing detections in wastewater in areas that may have a single clinical case of mpox. It has that sensitivity, which means that we can begin to look at it as a leading indicator. The substance-use side is a different type of technical challenge. On the bio side, there are very robust databases of genomes. On the chemistry side, even though you can create a library of all of the chemistry present in wastewater you don't have the names of them — that doesn't exist. Can we create a panel of detectible substances that we’re concerned about and that shouldn't be here? How do people’s concerns about health data privacy fit into this picture? I don’t want to minimize it. It’s central to our company, mission and strategy to have that front and center. Fortunately, many aspects of the technology make wastewater epidemiology quite safe. It’s naturally mixed and aggregated data. At Biobot, our roadmap is to look for infectious diseases or substances. We’re not looking for human DNA. We don’t have any sort of objective or product idea about human DNA or identifying people. What would you say to people who are worried about their health data being sold in the future? It’s already been sold. We have customers. The CDC pays, many government agencies pay to get the wastewater analyzed, and to get that data. To us, what that means is that transparency is important with the public. We have a public dashboard through which we try to share data directly with the public. At the moment, it only has Covid and Covid variant data. But it’s our vision that we can really give back to the public by also sharing data with them.
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