HIBT Lab! Biobot Analytics: Mariana Matus and Newsha Ghaeli

Biobot Analytics founders Mariana Matus and Newsha Ghaeli first met in a poop lab. Yep, you read that correctly... Their company has been working with government and corporate clients since 2017 to analyze disease levels and other biomarkers in our wastewater. Their insights have been used to predict spikes in Covid and other infections, help local officials address drug use in their communities, and much more. This week on How I Built This Lab, Mariana and Newsha talk with Guy about the innovation that can happen at the intersection of disciplines — Mariana is a scientist from Mexico, Newsha an architect from Canada. The women also share their vision for a future where cities better leverage the ‘data centers’ of our sewers to address chronic health issues and prepare for future pandemics. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2 a.m. kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people? So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan,

• 0:46Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 1:32Guy Raz?

  Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get The US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card.

• 2:14Guy Raz?

  Now you're earning 3% cash back on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association pursuant to a license from Visa USA Inc. Some restrictions apply. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer.

• 2:58Guy Raz?

  For the first time ever, new Delta SkyMiles Reserve American Express Card members can earn two Delta Comfort round trip flights for travel within the 48 contiguous US states, Puerto Rico, or the US Virgin Islands. Plus, you can earn 50,000 bonus miles towards your next getaway. And who doesn't appreciate an elevated airport experience? Delta SkyMiles Reserve Card members get access to the Delta Sky Club, your pre-flight oasis to recharge with 15 visits and four one-time guest passes each medallion year when flying Delta together. That's up to $950 in annual value.

• 3:40Guy Raz?

  Value estimate based on $50 per visit rate to purchase additional visits or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the card that upgrades your travel. Apply today at delta.com/cardsocial. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Maine to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance. Up to $80 per person and taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day.

• 4:23Guy Raz?

  And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talk to on this show, because the best ones obsess over things their customers will never see. Tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration. And not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the mobile brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobile Supreme Plus Premium Gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it. Three times cleaner compared to mobile regular gas in port fuel-injected engines. Actual results may vary.

• 5:07Guy Raz?

  Visit mobili fuels.com for details.

• 5:12Guy Raz?

  Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So every time you go to the bathroom, you are releasing a trove of information. So much so that wastewater treatment plants are kind of like massive data centers. There is so much we can find out about our health from our poo and pee. And the technology to analyze this data has grown at a really fast pace over the past decade. And so about five years ago, two women in Boston, one a biologist named Mariana Matus, the other an architect, Newsha Ghaeli, got together to start a company to analyze sewage and to find out whether they could detect things like diseases and viral outbreaks in specific communities. And it turns out you can.

• 5:57Guy Raz?

  And you can find out a whole bunch of other things by looking at wastewater. For example, opioid usage. Mariana and Newsha's company, called Biobot Analytics, works with public health agencies and even some private companies to help them understand how to get ahead of potential crises like a new outbreak of COVID. Let's start with with how the two of you met. Tell me how you guys met.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we met back in 2014. So I was at MIT. I was doing a PhD in computational biology. And I was working in a poop lab.

• 6:38Guy Raz?

  A poop lab?

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Yes, a lab where we would get poop samples from people, from mice and other animals, and sequence the community of bacteria that live in the poop, in the gut, to better understand the health of that individual. So we had begun to look at the collective biome, our wastewater, our collective poop.

• 7:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  As a source of data, particularly in collaboration with another lab that specializes in smart city technologies.

• 7:13Guy Raz?

  Right, and that's where Newsha comes in because you are an architect by training. Pick up the story, yeah.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so in 2014, I finished my graduate studies in architecture in Canada at McGill University. I'm Canadian originally. And I moved to the Boston area to start a fellowship at MIT on the future of our cities. So I was really interested in looking at various data sources, geolocated data in particular, that we're generating in our cities to help us address some big fundamental urban challenges.

• 7:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  And it was through that lens that I met Mariana. I learned about the power of sewage or the potential of the data in our sewer systems. And the concept just blew my mind. And to me, that was the future of our cities, so.

• 8:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah, because I imagine, Newsha, at the time, right? If you're an architect and working on smart cities, probably you were focused on like gathering data from gas meters or from, you know, cellphone towers.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 8:24Guy Raz?

  Right, like all that kind of data, which is still very valuable. But you probably weren't even thinking about wastewater data.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  No, not at all. You know, this is really, I think, exemplary of innovation that happens at the intersection of disciplines.

• 8:39Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Because absolutely, like, my lab traditionally would look at telco data, mobility data, data streams that are more common in the whole smart city, urban tech space. Sewage was definitely not one of them.

• 8:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And Mariana, in 2014, when you were working in a poop lab, right? I mean, even looking at human waste and trying to analyze it and assess, you know, a bunch of data, I mean, that, even in 2014, which isn't that long ago, that was pretty innovative, just doing that, wasn't it?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Over time, people have been studying samples that are more easy to collect.

• 9:20Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Like serum or blood samples, saliva, swabs.

• 9:25Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  But not many people like to collect and give poop for research. So.

• 9:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  It's definitely more of a newer thing, and in particular wastewater had been massively overlooked as a critical source of data to understand population health. And I think that the beauty of tapping into pee, poo, or wastewater as a data source is that we naturally are excreting it out. So rather than needing to be invasive and need to be poxed or swapped in order to get data, we naturally are producing this data every day and actually disposing it and collecting it into our wastewater infrastructure.

• 10:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I mean, essentially, sewers, right, and wastewater treatment facilities all over the world are these massive data centers, in a sense.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Absolutely. That's how we think about it. It's like bytes of data flowing on our feet through pipes in the city. And I think once you realize that, it's kind of impossible to go back and ignore it.

• 10:36Guy Raz?

  All right. So, Anusha, you meet Mariana. She's working on this clinical work at MIT. And how did, what did you start to work on together?

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Mariana had, she had led a grant proposal and they were awarded a few million dollars in grant funding, which was pretty incredible. And so when I met Mariana, that funding had just come through and they were ready to start building out a project team to take this work forward over the next few years.

• 11:07Guy Raz?

  To test it in a real world city or town?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Exactly, in cities. And so I ended up directly working with the cities. So a lot of our research was done in the city of Cambridge, city of Boston. Mariana and I had the opportunity to also travel abroad. We collected sewage in the Middle East, in Kuwait. We collected sewage in Asia, in South Korea, sending it all back to Cambridge. And so through that experience, I also really developed a really strong interest in working directly with government agencies to get this work off the ground.

• 11:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  And so, Guy, I'll just paint the picture for you. So in all of the early work we did at MIT, Mariana and I, and oftentimes other researchers as well, we were the ones physically collecting the samples.

• 12:01Guy Raz?

  You were going to the treatment centers, you were getting the wastewater facilities, you were getting jugs of sewage?

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. I mean, more than that, we were hovering over manholes in a city, pumping out sewage and in the middle of the street, pouring that sewage between different bottles and taking it back to the lab. So quite literally getting our hands dirty.

• 12:22Guy Raz?

  Wow. All right. So you get this grant to start gathering samples from sewers and then to, to test it. And what were you looking for in particular? Was there anything in particular you were looking for, Mariana?

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so when we started, the very first thing that we wanted to look for was the flu.

• 12:43Guy Raz?

  And you could detect that through, literally through sewage?

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Well, that was the question.

• 12:48Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Would it be possible to track the influenza season and see not only the level of disease happening in the city, but also the types of strains that are circulating? Is it flu A, flu B, H1N1? And how is the vaccine matching with what we're seeing in real time from people? That was our, our vision. We actually, in our very first experiment, when I was very early in my PhD, we miserably failed running that six-month experiment. So there was a moment there where I could have sort of like stopped working on it and said, this doesn't work.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  But instead, I decided to dig into it and to try to understand, okay, why didn't it work? Was it the problem of our methods, of which sites we selected to get wastewater from? Because we couldn't collect some of the samples during winter time, when there's like snow on the ground.

• 13:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Is it the time of the day that we are getting the sample out? We already know that flu was tough, but there are so many other biomarkers, potential biomarkers in the wastewater. What can we see? And at the core, is it all just noise? Or will we be able to extract epidemiologic data that is reflective of what's happening in people?

• 14:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So how did you answer that question?

• 14:19Speaker 02

  As she said, one of the questions was, what is the best time of day to sample? So we decided, let's take a sample every hour over 24 hours and look at that data and see when is the best time of day to sample. So we had shifts of people out on the street. So these are researchers, master's students, PhD students at MIT, transporting sewage over the course of 24 hours from the street to the lab and filtering that wastewater. It was a lot of work.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  We had to train over 30 people to pull it off. It was a massive effort and we succeeded.

• 15:02Guy Raz?

  What did you find? What, tell me what kind of data you collected.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  We saw that 8:00 AM seems to be the peak book time. At least for that neighborhood that we were looking at. And we collected sequencing data to see what types of bacteria are present in the wastewater and if they are coming from people's poop, or if they are bacteria that live in the sewer. And we also collected metabolite data, basically chemicals that we excrete in our pee, that can be maybe medications or hormones. So we collected both. And what we found was really impressive. We were able to see that most of the data

• 15:50Speaker 01

  in the wastewater was coming from people.

• 15:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So initially, you were really trying to figure out if you could isolate all of these different bacteria and you could categorize them and determine a variety of things, what medications people were using, whether people had influenza. And you, it sounds like this experiment proved that out, that you could actually do that. You could actually find out a bunch of things, you know, diseases, medications people were taking, you know, infections, viruses, whatever it was, you could find this out by just collecting the amalgamation of everyone's poo and pee.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And that this was a very data-rich source. It wasn't noise. And I think that when I saw that data, for me being a scientist, that's what, to this day, gave me the conviction that there was something really interesting and important here.

• 16:53Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, how Mariana and Newsha are able to use wastewater to understand the health of cities. That's in just a moment. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz. You're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 17:07Guy Raz?

  Does your team want a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship? Well, Framer is built exactly for that. With Framer, you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting, and a CMS built in, so the work is production-ready from day one. And you can get it done with help from Framer's AI agents. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. AI agents and humans work together.

• 17:49Guy Raz?

  The agents bring speed and scale, and people bring taste, judgment, and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities, it's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on.

• 18:34Guy Raz?

  NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called "Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work." And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization. And how to position your business to prosper from it.

• 19:19Guy Raz?

  If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. netsuite.com/built. Stripe is built for whatever comes next because the pace of change has never been faster than it is right now. New business models, new currencies, and new expectations for speed, reliability, and scale. Stripe builds financial infrastructure that helps businesses start, grow, and operate globally. From payments and billing to fraud protection and cross-border payouts,

• 20:03Guy Raz?

  Stripe is built to support the new pace of commerce. They're trusted by the companies building at the frontier, from 86% of the Forbes AI 50 to global leaders like Salesforce and OpenAI. In fact, more than 1.6% of global GDP flows through Stripe, with Stripe's users processing a combined $1.9 trillion last year. So if you're already thinking about what's next for your business, see what's possible at stripe.com.

• 20:46Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and I'm speaking with Mariana Matus and Newsha Ghaeli, who are developing the science of wastewater epidemiology with their company, Biobot Analytics. All right, so now you've proved this out. The two of you eventually decide together to launch a company to do this commercially. I was surprised to learn you're the first company to actually do this commercially, that there were no companies Gathering this data and analyzing it, you know, and making it available to business or government, whoever.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. When we started BioBot, we were the first company in the world to bring wastewater intelligence to market. And it was precisely for that reason. I mean, Mariana and I both really had the conviction that this information needed to exist and would exist one day, sort of regardless of our efforts. It was just too rich of a source of information. And rather than, you know, continue as a research group, we wanted to actually start a company to be able to respond to what our communities wanted and be able to generate the data that our community leaders, our public health leaders actually wanted in

• 22:06Speaker 02

  order to help them improve public health infrastructure, public safety infrastructure in our cities and actually benefit our communities.

• 22:16Guy Raz?

  So tell me, let's start with what you can do right now with the technology that you're developing. What can you measure from wastewater? From basically every time we flush the toilet and, you know, you gather that sample, what can you measure right now?

• 22:33Speaker 01

  One of the most important applications of the platform right now is to look at infectious diseases that are circulating in a community, starting with the analysis of wastewater for COVID-19 levels.

• 22:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  COVID-19 variants. We sequence the wastewater and we know which variants, which mutations are circulating in a community as well. We are doing analysis for monkeypox as well, like an outbreak that surprised everybody.

• 23:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Actually, you can look at influenza. You know, now with the benefit of having done this work for many years, it was actually one of the toughest applications to build on the platform. Influenza is is more sensitive to degradation in the wastewater.

• 23:21Guy Raz?

  Right, but it is possible you can detect it.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely, it is possible to look at influenza, RSV, other respiratory viruses, to look at gastrointestinal diseases like norovirus, to look at sexually transmitted diseases like gonorrhea or chlamydia, to look at bloodborne pathogens like hepatitis C.

• 23:45Guy Raz?

  Wow, you can detect all of that?

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Yes, based on our research to date and that of other groups, we actually end up excluding most of the infectious diseases that infect our bodies.

• 23:59Guy Raz?

  What, right now, what can't you measure with the technology?

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Right now, we cannot measure more complex population characteristics like obesity or cancer rates or diabetes rates.

• 24:12Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  We're only measuring things where there's a direct one-to-one kind of biomarker and something that we want to report on. But I absolutely see the future where we will have enough data to start to learn kind of predictive components of data to then be able to look at those other more chronic diseases. And ultimately, of course, be able to flag a new threat before anybody else knows about it.

• 24:42Guy Raz?

  So essentially, I mean, it seems so clear that you could get all this data from wastewater, I mean, especially as you're talking about it. But it's relatively new that this has been happening. And a lot of us heard about this during COVID. You know, you'd hear about wastewater gathered and they could measure COVID rates, which was remarkable. You could, and you could see COVID rates sort of spiking in wastewater before the hospitalization spiked. It was like a few days, kind of gives you a few days' warning of what was about to happen.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot of the behavioral sort of differences of the wastewater data compared to clinical data or hospitalization data has to do with, you know, a point we made earlier in the conversation that this is a behavior that we're engaging in every single day, whether you're symptomatic or asymptomatic, you're using the bathroom. And so that data is getting flushed down the toilet, it's aggregating in our sewer systems, we're collecting it, and you are being counted in that wastewater data as early as day one or two or three of your infection. Now, if you choose to now go get tested, get a PCR test, which, you know, at this

• 25:56Speaker 02

  point in the pandemic, not many people are even doing that, but should you choose to get a PCR test to be counted in the official clinical numbers, you're probably not doing that until day four, or five, or six of your infection.

• 26:08Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  When your symptoms are getting worse. And so what that looks like in the data is a week-long, sometimes two-week-long sort of head start.

• 26:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  That the wastewater data has on our clinical data.

• 26:19Guy Raz?

  Because the wastewater data is going to show that you are, you've got COVID like days before you might even know yourself.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly.

• 26:28Guy Raz?

  So, all right, so you, the two of you launched this company, BioBot, and you had to raise money. This is not an inexpensive proposition. You've got to have labs, you've got to have lab technicians. Was it challenging to raise money for this? I mean, given that this is such a new technology, or were there lots of people really interested in supporting this?

• 26:48Speaker 01

  What we've seen is a lot of intellectual curiosity about the company and the potential here.

• 26:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  But indeed, it's been a challenge for many investors to wrap their heads around this new type of business model and a startup that is proposing to work with government as the target customer, as the core customer from day one. That's not common at all.

• 27:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 27:18Guy Raz?

  So, all right, so now you've got this company, BioBot, and I think you have about 100 employees. And help me understand the business model, right? I mean, obviously, your product is data, right, on pathogens and disease and viruses, et cetera. But who are your customers? Like hospitals, government agencies, businesses?

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so our customers are primarily government agencies. So those are agencies at the local, so municipal, county, state, and federal level. Our largest customer right now is the CDC. And so we work with all levels of government. And when we work with government, we typically work with public health departments, but also elected officials sometimes. You know, sometimes in a community, it might be the mayor's office that's driving the data collection from wastewater. And essentially, for these communities, they see the value in not just the COVID data, but rather in wastewater intelligence as

• 28:20Speaker 02

  a platform. So that's really how we position the technology is that right now, the data that they might need is the COVID data and the variant data.

• 28:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  But this is actually a platform and a long term shift in how communities should think about their sewer infrastructure. You know, we see this as being a permanent layer in the urban fabric. And then we have multiple stakeholders interested in the data. So we could be working with a city who is only interested in looking at their own data, but then we work with a state that is, you know, monitoring dozens of communities within their state. And then through our work with the CDC, we're working in over 400 communities across the country.

• 29:04Guy Raz?

  How would you see private industry maybe leveraging this data? I mean, is there a, is there an opportunity, a market opportunity there? Or do you think that ultimately, this is, this is really only going to be used by government agencies?

• 29:21Speaker 02

  So we do work with some enterprise clients as well. So these are namely office buildings or campuses that are so large that they somewhat operate like a small city or a mini-city.

• 29:35Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  So the types of buildings we monitor can range from large office campuses or parks in Texas or California, all the way to skyscrapers in Manhattan. And they can monitor the sewage coming out of that building or group of buildings and use that information to help them better understand and stay on top of the spread of, you know, in this case, it's mostly COVID within that community. It's a much cheaper alternative to clinically testing employee bases. There are a number of companies that still do that.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  So, you know, thinking about how you can leverage wastewater to help guide these other interventions. And then we also work with university campuses, so similar value proposition there, and prison systems to help guide, you know, when there might be silent outbreaks in the community and guide when they should deploy clinical tests to identify some of these silent outbreaks.

• 30:41Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 30:43Guy Raz?

  Give me a sense of how the data can be applied and used to maybe prevent something bad from happening or to throw resources to a certain crisis or challenge. I mean, let's use opioids, for example, because I know that's something that you can track in wastewater. You can track how, you know, how intense the problem is in a community, how many people, roughly the percentage of the population using it. What can you find out about opioids actually from wastewater?

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, with opioids, that's a very valuable proposition for our government customers because Right now, the best data they have to understand the opioid crisis in their community is to look at overdose deaths. That's the gold standard.

• 31:31Guy Raz?

  Right, they just look at deaths?

• 31:32Speaker 01

  They look at deaths.

• 31:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  And that's tough, not only because that data is heavily delayed, but also because it only represents a very, very tiny portion of the people who are suffering from substance use disorder. So that data keeps making them look back rather than be able to respond to the people who are alive and can get help now. So a very big value proposition of our data is that it reflects consumption from people who are alive, who can get help. And more importantly, it also gives them intelligence on what are the type of substances that are driving consumption?

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Is it mostly prescription opioids? Is it street or illicit opioids that are getting consumed in their city or town? And that necessitates a different intervention. So just to give you an example, our very first customer for this work was the town of Cary, North Carolina. And by working with Biobot, they were able to understand that, number one, opioid use was happening everywhere in their town. So that's already huge, right?

• 32:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  It's already helping them understand that this is widespread everywhere. And also, second, they were able to see that it was mostly about prescription opioids rather than heroin or other illicit opioids in their town. So they were able to design an educational campaign and to bring to their town safe disposal boxes for people to get rid of any excess prescription opioids they may have at home. It was a massive success. The message was embraced by the community, and they saw a 40% decrease in overdoses, which was also the first ever decrease they'd seen in overdoses in their town in almost a decade.

• 33:33Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 33:36Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, more from Mariana Matus and Newsha Ghaeli, co-founders of Biobot Analytics. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 33:50Speaker 03

  Football is back and PrizePix is bringing out their best offer yet. New users who sign up will get $150 in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. That's right, if you win your first $5 lineup, you'll get $150 in lineups. On PrizePix, you simply pick two to six players, pick more or less on their stat projections, and submit your lineup. Then sweat it out as you watch your picks play out live. It's the best way to get more locked in on game day. Make all the picks you want this football season, all in the same app. And now PrizePix is available nationwide. So what are you waiting for? Lock in for kickoff because everyone and everything is on PrizePix. What you on?

• 34:35Speaker 04

  Download the PrizePix app today and use code WONDERY, that's code WONDERY, to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. PrizePix, run your game. Must be present in certain states. Visit PrizePix.com for restrictions and details.

• 35:03Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz and my guests today are Mariana Matos and Nusha Gaely, the minds behind Biobot Analytics, the first company in the world to commercialize data from sewage.

• 35:18Guy Raz?

  I'm curious, I mean, Mariana, you are a biologist, Nusha, you're an architect, and so you have this deep, you know, sort of scientific specialization, and yet you're also running a business. And so it means that you've had to raise money. I think you've raised, the latest number I see, you've raised about $30 million and maybe more by this point. How do you balance the, you know, the scientific work with just the work of, of like hitting the road? Dealing with investors and, you know, and running a business.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  It's been a learning curve.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  I think that, you know, when we both decided to start the company, we both had a moment to express our interest to to grow into becoming a founder, an entrepreneur, an executive, knowing that it would be a wild ride, right? And that we would be learning on the job.

• 36:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  And that is something that I always like to tell other other scientists or technical people who are interested in starting companies is that it's okay to not know those pieces and that the best way to learn is actually just to do it.

• 36:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And Lucia, what about you?

• 36:30Speaker 02

  I wholeheartedly agree. When I think back on what really made us decide to start the company, to me, there was this turning point where I first learned from her that she didn't want to pursue a career in academia and was interested in entrepreneurship. And then I similarly shared that I wasn't interested in pursuing a career in academia and was interested in moving to industry and innovation. And and I think that just opened this whole door for us to start sharing and talking about how we want to grow in the business world as business leaders and technology leaders. And it gave us the confidence, at least it gave me the confidence

• 37:12Speaker 02

  that, you know, she would give me the space to grow and I knew that she would grow and and we would really work on becoming the best version of ourselves and leading this company. And I think if you want to be a founder, irrespective of your background, you need to just have that love of learning and growing.

• 37:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah. When you started, you were the first commercial outfit doing this, which is amazing because you really just launched, I think, five years ago. And now there are other competitors in this space. But I have to imagine there's probably plenty of work to go around.

• 37:48Guy Raz?

  Aside from from being able to maybe predict an outbreak or, you know, or something like that, what other, you know, what are the things do you think that ultimately we'll be able to learn from wastewater that? We're not able to do now, or we don't know right now.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Yes, that's a great question. I think that besides the very compelling applications of the platform in the space of infectious diseases, we also absolutely believe that the drug use data that we can collect from wastewater, so use of substances like opioids, meth, cocaine, and other emerging substances, will just transform our ability to understand and to tackle that other crisis that is happening, not only here in the US, but internationally. So I think that there's a huge other area of opportunity to use the platform to improve health outcomes and to increase national security.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  But also, I think ultimately, what this platform is about is about empowering people, empowering government leaders, business leaders, but also just citizens, everyday people. Our vision is that these data should be widely available and accessible to everyone because we're all contributing to it. And we're already seeing such great engagement with our data, with our platform, just through social media. We have our fan base, and we want to do more of that.

• 39:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll also add that the more and more locations domestically and abroad come online and are generating, you know, this intelligence from their wastewater systems, the more powerful the data becomes. There truly is a network effect at play because for me, living in New York City, for example, it's not just important what's happening here in the city, it's also important what's happening in neighboring states. You know, New York is a travel hub. It's important what's happening in London. It's important what's happening in in Hong Kong. Our health is so interconnected. We live in an increasingly globalized world, increasingly urbanized environments.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Climate change is just accelerating the potential of outbreaks with pandemic potential. And so having a global wastewater intelligence system in place is going to be really critical to our collective public health.

• 40:20Guy Raz?

  My understanding right now is that your analytics are not able to kind of link results to specific individuals. Obviously, you're collecting just the collective waste of a community or city. But there have been concerns, and you've gotten some of these concerns, about what you might be able to determine in the future, right? Because wastewater does contain genetic data that might, that does allow us to, or public health officials, to identify a pathogen. But maybe it also includes our genetic data that could also be detected at some point. We don't, we're not able to do that now, but it doesn't seem like a huge leap of faith to imagine in the future, you could identify biomarkers that

• 41:03Guy Raz?

  link to an individual. Is that, am I talking science fiction here, or is that something that is plausible?

• 41:09Speaker 01

  It is possible. As you say, there are traces of human genetic material in the wastewater that are coming from the cells that our body is shedding when we shower, or when we go to the bathroom. So it's technically possible. It's technically very difficult. So basically, you just take all of the DNA present in the wastewater and you sequence it. You're not targeting precisely any one group. You just get all of the genetic data. And we found that much less than 1% of the genetic data we got back was coming from people. So if

• 41:51Speaker 01

  somebody wanted to build that application, it would be a very tough one, technically, which is great, because the system is naturally protective. But I do agree that, as leaders in this space, we have the responsibility to think about these questions, and to think about how we can position the technology and inform public opinion, engage experts in ethics, in data privacy, legislators, in order to put in place guidelines that allow us to get benefits from the technology without needing to cross into privacy concerns.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  We want to be the ethics-first option in the marketplace, the one that is being a thought leader, that is engaging the public in these tough questions, and that is thinking about how to do it right by people.

• 42:48Guy Raz?

  So when you think about where this technology will be in, let's say, 10 years from now, I mean, given that it's so new now, right? I mean, you started working on this, you know, 10 years ago, I think, right? And I mean, it's probably improved leaps and bounds since then and what you can do. You weren't able to detect influenza initially. Where do you see this in 10 years? What kinds of data and information will you be able to glean?

• 43:14Speaker 01

  I think we'll be able to better understand not just infectious diseases or drug use. We'll be able to understand chronic diseases, cancer, wellness-type indicators to understand mental health and stress levels. We can look at hormones like cortisol to understand how stressed a population is. We can look at dietary data to understand if there are social determinants of health, food deserts, and better inform the design of our public health systems and cities. I think that in 10 years, if I look out 10 years, I think that the world will have adopted this type of data collection by large. I think most places will be online, if you will.

• 43:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Hopefully, we'll be a force that brings together not only regions within a country, but also continents to be able to facilitate the exchange of data. But also, I think that ultimately, we are giving wastewater infrastructure a new function. And my dream is that one day, this data is so necessary, so critical to operate a country, that this will encourage the development of more sanitation in the developing world.

• 44:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Just to give you one data point there, Mexico, where I'm from originally, discharges a lot of the wastewater straight into the environment without treatment.

• 44:43Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  There isn't enough investment in sanitation. And one day, my dream is that this data will just add another reason for us to build sewers and infrastructure everywhere. And maybe it will even be designed to make this type of data collection easier.

• 45:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, essentially, if you can illustrate to cities and sanitation officials what is actually in the sewage, it will incentivize them to work on systems that treat it before it's released into the ocean and waterways?

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 45:18Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. I mean, it's already happening, you know, in some countries where they are building cities sort of from scratch, where, you know, we've talked to some of the folks leading those urban planning projects around how can they build smart sewers into their design from the get-go?

• 45:38Guy Raz?

  Hmm. That's really cool. Super cool.

• 45:43Guy Raz?

  Mariana Matus and Newsha Gali of BioBot Analytics, thank you so much.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Thank you, Guy.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 45:52Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at HowIBuiltThis and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, I'm at Guy.Raz. If you want to contact the team, our email address is [email protected]. This episode was produced by Carla Estevez with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Runtin Arabluie. Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Chris Messini, Elaine Coats, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, and Kerry Thompson. Our intern is Susannah Brown.

• 46:37Guy Raz?

  Niva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.