Mariana Matus is co-founder and CEO of Biobot Analytics. Her problem: How do you turn sewage into useful public health data?
When she and her co-founder launched the company, wastewater epidemiology was a niche field nobody paid much attention to. The Covid pandemic changed that. Studying wastewater has become one of the most important tools for tracking the pandemic. And Mariana's company, Biobot Analytics, has become a global leader in the field, with tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue.
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Pushkin. If you took a COVID test recently, you probably took it at home, and if you tested positive, you probably didn't report the results to your local health department, which you know fair enough, no judgment. But in the big picture this does create a problem. How do we keep track of COVID levels as public testing declines. How do we look out for new variants? How do we monitor new outbreaks? The answer, in a word, is poop. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is what's your problem. My guest today is Mariana Matus, co founder and CEO of biobot Analytics. The company analyzes sewage samples from hundreds of water treatment plants across the US and Canada. They provide an aggregate picture of the cod status of tens of millions of people. Marianna's problem is this, how do you move beyond COVID to turn raw sewage into data that can help improve global public health. As it's become clear that sampling sewage is one of the best ways to track the COVID pandemic, the field of wastewater epidemiology has become a big deal. But when Marianna discovered the field, it wasn't particularly popular or flashy. It was years before the pandemic when she was working on her PhD and computational biology at MIT. But Marianna told me studying wastewater seemed like a great fit for what she wanted to do. When I came across this space of voicewatermology through through my laboratory, it was perfect, I think for me as a combination of cutting edge science but also like a very big societal impact. When you imagined having a big societal impact through your study of wastewater epidemiology, like what did you imagine? What was like your big, big dream. I grew up in Mexico City and in a you know, in a very sort of like slummy part of Mexico City, not on the nice part of Mexico City. So I grew up basically with zero government resources, you know, in areas that are ignored and that don't receive any sort of like government resources. And I grew up thinking that life was like that. And then my career took me to study in great universities and places, you know, in the Netherlands, in the UK, in Boston, and then I just began to realize that it actually it's not like that. Not every places like that, And to me, you know, I think like the more that dug into it through my peach D studies, like I realized that a big part of the solution starts with collecting the data to demonstrate those health disparities that you know, I know that are out there and everybody sort of like knows that are out there. But it's just hard to to really take action when you just don't have it in your face and not don't have a way to measure progress. So what I would imagine is, how can we use the data from the waste water to give everybody a voice and to create maps of what's happening near real time everywhere and to and to design action around that data. How did you go from that initial kind of big dream to starting a company? So when I came to MT, it sort of like I had all these dreams in my head about like, oh, imagine using science to you know, just impact society. Wouldn't that be amazing? But I didn't know what that meant in practice. And when I came to MT, I discovered entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship, h yes, I mean just like the concept that anybody can be a founder and start their own company, right, Like, just that concept, I would believe it or not. I mean, I just didn't know about that before I came to a m I T. I always thought only people that already have family money, or like you know that studied business for underground, they are the ones who can start businesses. And just that concept completely blew my mind. And I think it was for me like the missing piece. I realized, Oh, wow, well, then that's how I do it. That's how I create a company based on science to go and solve a big problem. One thing I heard you talking about and another interview was when you were starting the company, people seem to misunderstand and think that you should be starting a nonprofit instead of a company. Is that right and if so, can you tell me about that? Absolutely so. The idea of selling to government, the idea of of operating in the space of public health, and the idea of having two women co founders out of MIT basically two very technical women co founders. Kind of it was a kind of a perfect trifecta for investors to think about US as a nonprofit. You mentioned gender, You mentioned the fact that that you and your co founder are both women, and that that played into it. How did that? How did that work? What was going on there? Yeah, it seems that we you know, I had to be very proactive about kind of explaining I'm doing this not just to have public impact, not just to have a social impact. I'm doing this because I'm also looking to have a financial outcome. And I just found it funny that I had to be saying like, hey, I want to make money, like you know, I personally also want to make any Why wouldn't I? Right, So, okay, so so you found the company. So so let's jump to say twenty nineteen, like beginning of twenty twenty. Now you have this little company that's been up and running for a couple of years. It's analyzing wastewater, but you have no revenue. You have a staff of just like five people. You built this little machine that goes into the sewer to collect sewage, and you're working on one pilot project. And that project isn't even a fur infectious disease. Right, You're looking at opioids, You're you're sort of studying the opioid epidemic. And yet this is this moment when history is like barreling towards you. Right, this pandemic is about to you know, change everything, right, And so I'm curious when did you start to hear about, you know, about this new coronavirus outbreak. Yeah, I think for us, UM it really began to catch our attention in like early twenty twenty, like January twenty twenty. Do you remember any particular moments, any particular conversations or reading anything or talking to anybody. I mean definitely, so some of those like first conversations that happened where we had been forming a relationship with folks within HHS, like the federal HHS Department of Health and Human Services, the big federal Apartment of Health and Human Services in DC. So I remember we were in DC in February of twenty twenty, basically like already pitching that we should begin to test the waste water of all of the major airports across the country to start getting a sense of the level of import And we were told, well, this outbreak is going to be contained within two weeks, so it would be a waste of your resources to try to develop a solution around this now because you're not going to be ready in less than two weeks. They were like, by the time you figure out how to do this test in a few weeks, this all things going to have blown over. It's not going exactly so. But despite that sort of like very strong feedback, we came back from DC and we this was February of twenty twenty, and we make the decision that we were going to build a COVID solution based on the waste water and tell me about building that. We had to basically change everything. We had to throw away sort of like all of the progress that we had made up until that point to start over given the constraints at hand. Number one, this was there was a sense of emergency and that time was of the essence. So the idea of having to manufacture hardware in order to collect data at scale just seemed pretty hard or impossible in that moment. Also, do you know the supply chain issues all of You're not going to be able to make this special device. You're not gonna be only like a thousand of them in a couple of months or whatever, exactly exactly, So we decided, okay, where how else can we get wastewater easily? And we realize, oh, actually actually, there are sixteen thousand wastewater treatment plants in the US, covering eighty percent of the US population, and turns out most of them already have a similar type of equipment. So it's not portable, it's not as sophisticated, but it does the job at collecting that continues twenty four hour sample. The minimum viable product already exists at sixteen thousand wastewater plants all across the US, so we were like, okay, check. Second was the lab component. We had been building a chemistry platform, and obviously and COVID is caused by an RNA virus, so the detection or detest in the lab would need to be more of a molecular biology type of approach. We didn't have any of those capabilities, but we had raised seat round, like a you know, a four point two million dollars seat round, and so we had some money to just start getting some basic new equipment in the lab. And also we have a good relationship with my PhD advisor at MT so together with him, we actually used a lot of his lab early on in the pandemic and collaborated with his students. So you know, that's how we got started, and it took us like four weeks to just go from the decision point until having actually not just a proof that the test works with waste water, but also we wrote a scientific preprint, like a you know, a paper. So we were the first ones in the country to demonstrate that you can detect and quantify the virus causing COVID nineteen in wastewater samples and that it works well. And I think, you know, it was just from there that everything exploded. I mean, is there fear I assume that that there's no risk of transmitting the disease. I mean, it's obviously not transmitted through wastewater, but we're people afraid that it might be. We didn't know anything about COVID at the time. I mean, this is when I was still wiping off all my groceries with bleach, right, because literally we didn't know. Oh yes, there was a lot of concern. And actually that was you know, thank you for I feel like my brain probably like tried to forget that, but that was a very big deal. Like when we just started from for many reasons, nobody knew if the virus present in wastewater would be infectious. My very small team that we had. They were really afraid to have to handle the wastewater sample without knowing if they can get infected. So we came up with a solution for our lab where every every bottle of wastewater, example that arrives to buy a boat is first pasteurized in order to basically make it non infectious or like sterile. Yes. And the third thing was that I had just I was just pregnant at the time. I became pregnant in March of twenty twenty, my first pregnancy, my first you know baby, and I my husband and I also would go into the lab to model to the rest of our team that you know this is safe, Like you know, I'm pregnant, but I trust that the pasteurization is good enough to make this work safe and let me, you know, let me demonstrate that with my actions. At the time, it was a very big deal. So you have this idea, you have the proof that it works, You've convinced the staff at your company, at Bio Boat, that it's okay to do this. How do you get customers what happens next? So we designed a probono campaign where by About would absorb the cost of all of the testing for two months, and what happened it was beyond our wildest dreams, Like it exploded. It got picked up by the media. People loft this idea that you can fight COVID with poop. Poop. Yeah, you can fight COVID with poop. You know. That was that was basically the message being put out there. It went viral and we got in just the first ten days or so of announcing the campaign, we got four hundred plants nationwide wanting to enroll in the program. We had aspired to enroll up to one hundred, So it was it was crazy. The response was just crazy. But you know, that transition was tough because I guess also something that I haven't talked about is that in that early twenty twenty stage, when we were the first ones, the more established academics were skeptical and basically like recommending caution with these and slowing things down for us. And so it was a very Were they skeptical of wastewater sampling in general or were they skeptical of your company? Or was it both both both? So, up until twenty twenty, the wastewater epidemiology was a very niche and obscure area of science, So the entire field was a little bit like, you know, not very well known obviously. And if that was within science, just imagine within government, you know, like it was just nobody was saying, oh, I need wastewater data, like who can provide it for me? Why do you think that is? I mean, do you think it's partly like because it's poop, because it's sewage? Like why do you think people were ignoring this source of data? Really? I mean, is it because it's it's poop and people are kind of embarrassed by it don't like to talk about it? Like has that been a barrier too? I mean I think that No. I think that actually people love all of the poop jokes and poop humor. I feel like that actually tends to be like a plus. How do you feel about them at this point? Like are you tired of them? Do they work in your favor? Like our poop jokes like enough, I never want to hear a poop joke again? No, no, no, I love it. I love it. And our company culture, you know, celebrates the poop humor quite a lot with okay, our you know, branding and suave and you know, we we love it. We love the users of the poop emoji or they're like particularly very big. Oh yeah, the poop emoji is the most use emoji in the bay about slack, it makes sense. I mean, it's why they're used even at places that have nothing to do with it. Right, So yes, no, I think that, you know, I think that the barrier to research and to you know, first to research and then to the adoption of the data is just that the bar to get the data in is very high in the sense that there's a lot of operational and logistical work in order to get data. So when you are working within a university or within a government agency, who really has the time to be you know, building kits to transport wastewater, learning how to the regulations to transport it going out there, or finding the relationships to send you the waste water in doing all of that groundwork in the lab, right groundwork. Right, It's very logistical. It's not like high minded, it's not fancy math. It's just getting appealed to the lab. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So when I was a PITCHD student that in my t I was basically like the only one like willing to do the groundwork because I started working on always what epidemiology during my PhD. That's what my pitchd PSIS was about. But you know, I really struggled with just like recruiting a team around me, because folks were wanting to help with the data analysis, the data visualization, but not the eighty percent groundwork that goes behind it. So nobody wants get the proof exactly. So that's why I thought, always thought, you know, if this science is going to really go mainstream, it needs an organization dedicated like one to it so that we can do that around work and then the scientists. Yes, of course, the power is in the data, in the insights that you can get out of it, but you know there's an eighty percent around work behind it. Well, I mean maybe that's part of the case for a for profit company, right Like profit is a very good incentive to do groundwork, absolutely absolutely Well. How big is the company now? Oh yeah, buy about now has one hundred employees. How much revenue do you have? More or less? This year? We are on track to make over twenty million dollars in revenue, okay, which is great also to be here given that two years ago we were basically pre revenue. So yes, two years ago was zero. From zero to twenty million, there's a lot. Are you profitable, No, not yet. I mean we are investing heavily in our R and D so that we can look at other types of data. So story so far. Three years ago, Mariana barely had a company, and waste water surveillance was this little niche thing in the US. And then by the beginning of this year, when the omicron wave hit the country, BAA was this big, real company. Wastewater surveillance was one of the most important tools public health officials used to figure out where cases were spiking, so that they could direct resources into the right neighborhoods and you know, plan for surges and hospital admissions. And the story is not over in a minute. What we still don't know about poop and disease. It's a lot. Now back to the show. And one thing I'm curious about, Well, what is your company's moat? Right? Like, how is what you do not just some commodity thing that anybody with the lab can do. Yeah, I think that that's a great question. Everybody, anybody, anybody out there could go and let's say open amunthole and get a bucket in pull up wastewater, take it to a lab and they would get a number, a number meaning like an amount of COVID that's in there or something. You may get an amount of COVID, you make, an amount of opioids, an amount of influenza, right like any any number. You may get a number, But what does that number mean? Like that number in isolation really doesn't mean anything. So our secret sauce is how do we create how do we make wastewater a data platform? And that really means it's a systems level type of design and product. We actually need to use the same method in every sample. If we want to calculate, if we want to compare across time, if we want to compare across locations, we want to build a state statewide trend, if we want to compare regions, if we want to calculate a national average, it's imperative to actually use the same methods at every stage for every sample. Otherwise you don't have that comparability wastewater. Again, the power of the wastewater isn't about what you about the number that you get from a single wastewater sample. The power of wastewater is about having that bird's eye view, that systems level view of what's happening in an entire country, in an entire state. You can drill in more geographically narrow, but you can also zoom out. That's the platform, that's the power that we're building. So in order to accomplish that, you know, that's where we come in, all of the relationships, all of the scale that eight you know, groundwork that I talked about. To accomplish that level of visibility, that's a tough problem. So it's like a network effect. There's a network effect thing people would want to use your company because you have the most data and therefore you have the best understanding of what one particular sample means because you can put it in the context of all the other data that you have gotten, have processed exactly exactly. So we have the largest network of sites in the world. It's mostly US, some Canada. How big is it now? We have over five hundred sites. What's something you haven't figured out yet? What's a problem your story of still trying to figure out how to solve Maybe you've tried it hasn't quite worked yet. What's something you're still working on in the lab. There is a lot of interest in looking at different targets, so not just COVID, but also influenza, neural virus. You can you know, at least keeps going right like monkey box where right now in advanced R and D for monkey pops, we're gonna have a start testing with water for monkey pops too. But it remains a challenge to know kind of how to which types of data we can collect and how to interpret them because we don't really know which pathogens are shed in poop. Huh, that's surprising. I would think people would just sort of have figured that out by now. Is that Does that go back to the fact that it's kind of an understudied area exactly exactly. There's a lot of information about how you can diagnose a disease in a person via like a serom sample, via maybe a blood test, yeah, a blood test, or maybe a you know, a swab or like a you know, a nasal swab or a saliva suab sometimes in in p But but pooh, I mean, why would they have to I mean, the clinic the worst way to get us to a sample for the doctor, right exactly, So so for the doctor like you know, again, poop is an understudied like sort of like diagnostic matrix. So you know, one wild dream of mine is for us to develop the clinical collaborations to to be able to know in people like how different diseases are um shedding in poop, because that that will help us to understand which targets will be easier to track via the waste water and how to interpret it. You mentioned sort of starting out in the field with this the dream of being able to to look at a city like Mexico City and get you know, sort of a map of what's going on with the health of people in the city. How do you get to there from where you are now? Because we have done some pilots in Mexico Ecuador Ry in partnership already with a World Bank, so you know, it's kind of how do we build on top of those early pilots that were very successful. So you sample, you know, big sewage systems in the US that allows you to capture something like eighty percent of the population, but it seems like in large parts of the developing world you have places you know, that are less developed, where where there are not sewage systems. What do you do there. There's many areas that don't have any sort of sanitation, right, so I think that for those areas there's just immediate action, which is we can use basically the same type of sampling approaches to open sewers, like basically which are rivers where the waste makes it into the river, and that that is possible, that that works, that's how some people already do waste. What are epithimolity You work in areas without the infrastructure. But I think you're right at over time this technology could be a new reason to invest in waste, what in building the waste water infrastructure where it doesn't exist, because now we're giving it a second second use, a second mission. This is no longer just about the collection and safe disposal of waste from people. This is about intelligence that you cannot really get any in any other way. So hopefully it can be a virtual cycle where it can foster the investment in the building of this infrastructure, which would only of course also improve public health because then would reduce the spread of disease. In a minute, the lightning round with questions about immigration, entrepreneurship, and what not to flush down the toilet now back to the show. Let's just do let's do like a lightning round. I'm just gonna ask you a bunch of fast questions and you can answer them fast. Why do you think immigrants are more likely than native born citizens to become entrepreneurs? That's a good question, so I I mean, I can only speak about my kind of experience, but at least in my case, I felt that a little bit like I had nothing to lose, So why not try? Like, why wouldn't I try? What's one thing people should never ever flush down the toilet? Well, that's a great question. Never flushed down the so called flushable wipes okay, not actually flushable at do not actually flushable. They don't dissolve in water, So what happens is that they create this massive the glock systems everywhere. The Q tips are also pretty bad because they have size tends to be the same as like some of the sort of like filters that capture just like big, big junk out of the waste water, so they also block those systems. The Q tips are not great to fulush either. Feel like I touch the nerve here? Yes? Oh yeah? If everything goes well, what problem will you be trying to solve in five years, due to climate change, we can expect to see more infectious outbreaks than before in a more frequent manner. The patterns of you know, just wildlife of insects, factor insects are just changing, so so we can expect to see more zonoric events of infectious diseases jumping to humans. So, in my opinion, I think that the next five to ten years should be more about that international collaboration around health understanding. You know, what we do here won't be enough. We need to be connected. So I would love if we have been so successful at collecting, you know, at building this data asset and having the trust of different governments that we can even begin to be part of that collaboration. What's the most interesting thing you ever saw pulled out of a sewer? Oh? Wow, Yeah, that's another good one. Well, I mean I didn't pull this myself, but we were touring one of the plants that we work with in in Portland, Maine just a few weeks ago, and they were telling us that they recently pulled the door of a car. I don't know what happened, but there was a door of a car that they had to pull out of the stream. Marianna Matus is co founder and CEO of biobot Analytics. Today's show was produced by Edith Ruslow, engineered by Amanda ka Wong, and edited by Robert Smith. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem