Whether we realize it or not, we leave clues to our health every time we use the bathroom.

The excretions we flush down the drain without a second thought offer a treasure trove of data and community health insight toBiobot Analytics. Biobot is the first company in the world to commercialize data from sewage. What we eat, the pathogens we harbor, and the drugs we use all end up in wastewater, and ultimately, that sewage contains a wealth of information about a community’s health.

For CEO and Co-founder Mariana Matus, working on wastewater is personal. Growing up in Mexico City, Matus saw that many rivers and lakes were polluted and dying off because much of the wastewater was dumped back into the environment without being treated. “I grew up witnessing the direct impact of human population and wastewater on the environment, and I wanted to be a part of the solution,” she says.

When Matus arrived in the US for her PhD in Eric J. Alm’s laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alm was working on the NIH Human Microbiome Project. At the lab, “we were used to thinking about poop as data that tells us something about the health of a person,” explains Matus. As an extension, she wondered: If we can learn about the health of a person by studying their poop, what can we learn about the health of a city by looking at a collection of human waste, in sewage?

BioBot Analytics在2017年脱颖而出，因为MATUS即将结束她的博士学位课程。她和建筑师联合创始人Newsha Ghaeli首先开发了生物射击，以跟踪社区中阿片类药物和其他高风险物质的使用。目的是，现在仍然是，要转移倾向于不考虑消费率的公共卫生官员的重点到城市。

In 2020, when the COVID pandemic arrived, the company expanded and began focusing on infectious disease. Recently, Biobotpartneredwith Illumina to validate theIllumina COVIDSeq™ Assayon wastewater samples that Biobot provided.

During the pandemic, Biobot’s work proved that wastewater data can help predict COVID surges up to two weeks before hospitals report theirs. Biobot uses polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and RNA sequencing (via Illumina’s tools) to glean insights in the spread of disease, with the latter allowing scientists to monitor the spread of variants. “Before COVID, [wastewater] data was purely an academic exercise,” says Matus. But with Biobot’s data, hospitals in the Boston metropolitan area were able to take preventive measures before the Omicron surge by cutting back on their elective surgeries and increasing capacity in their emergency rooms.

到目前为止，BioBot已与包括美国卫生与公共服务部以及CDC在内的政府机构合作，以实施其技术。188bet上不了每周，Biobot测试200多个社区样本，该样本代表美国44个州超过3000万人。188bet网址怎么打不开Matus表示，该公司还开始与雇主和其他希望监视其设施中的Covid爆发的人合作。

Moving forward, Matus is hoping to bring Biobot testing to every state and large metropolitan area in the US. Eventually, she hopes that the company can collect data from cities and countries all over the world to become a source of global data on infectious disease and human health. “My greatest hope is that this data can move from being a novelty to being credible enough to eventually become the new standard to understanding human health,” she says.

To read more about surveillance of infectious disease through wastewater sequencing, click这里.

要了解有关识别冠状病毒和其他新兴病原体新型菌株的更多信息，请单击这里.