Chris Randall, a field technician with EST Associates, an environmental-field-services company, was standing over a manhole cover in Cambridge, Massachusetts, holding two crowbars, preparing to collect some feces. “ ‘Waste’ is probably the term we use most often,” he said, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. He wore an orange safety vest, a surgical mask, lab goggles, and plastic sleeves that went up to his elbows.
“It’s called ‘stool’ within the medical community, or ‘biological sample,’ ” Jennings Heussner, a business-development associate with Biobot Analytics, who accompanied Randall, said. Biobot is a company that specializes in wastewater epidemiology, or the study of sewage for the purpose of tracking the spread of disease. “We are great at euphemisms in this business,” Heussner added.
Biobot has a contract with Cambridge to analyze wastewater for COVID-19. The city and the school district used the data to help make decisions about whether schools should stay open; last month, the district switched to remote learning, after high wastewater virus levels and daily cases rose. Water samples are collected every Tuesday morning. Randall hooked the crowbars under the manhole cover and pried it off. A yellow harness hung inside, attached to what looked like a small submarine dangling below. Randall pulled it up, opened the lid, and removed a bottle. “It’s a combination of sink water and toilet water,” he said, holding the bottle up to the light. “It’s not too cloudy.” He carefully poured the contents into specimen tubes, which would be shipped to a lab and analyzed.
Biobot was founded in 2017 by Newsha Ghaeli and Mariana Matus, who met at M.I.T., where Matus was getting a Ph.D. in computational and systems biology and Ghaeli was a research fellow in urban studies and planning. “The overarching question was: Can we look at our sewer systems as being analogous to the human gut?” Ghaeli, the company’s president, said over the phone. “In the same way you can tell a lot about a person by sampling their gut, what can we learn from a community, a neighborhood, from sampling sewage?”
Before COVID, the company worked with a few cities to identify areas where opioid abuse was prevalent, so that officials might intervene before overdoses increased. When the pandemic arrived, Biobot started monitoring wastewater for signs of outbreaks before hospitals became overwhelmed. Testing wastewater turned out to be simpler than testing individuals; a picture of a whole community could be created while people stood in long lines to get nasal swabs. “If one good thing comes from this year, it’s going to be a renewed focus on public health,” Ghaeli said.
Ghaeli was born in Iran and grew up in Canada. When she and Matus began their wastewater-epidemiology research, while still at M.I.T., there were relatively few scientists studying human health via sewage. They quickly learned about the peculiar challenges posed by their research. They got permission to take samples from the manhole closest to their lab, but the process—especially removing the manhole cover—proved cumbersome. “They’re really heavy,” Ghaeli said. Often, they’d persuade public-works employees to help. Then she and Matus would move in with a homemade apparatus—“a twenty-foot pole and a container for scooping the sewage out,” Ghaeli said. “Mariana and I were both, like, There has to be a better way to collect the sample, because this is kind of gross.”
They also realized that they needed to collect samples over time, rather than just once. They mapped Cambridge’s sewer system and designed a collection device with a filter that could sit inside manholes and take samples over a twenty-four-hour period. In the summer of 2019, they tasked an intern with devising a magnetic manhole-opener. (“That was a game-changer,” Ghaeli said.) It is exacting work. “Mariana got really sick from a splash in the lab, and then I got a horrible rash from a splash in the field,” Ghaeli said. “That reinforced the need to be very meticulous about protocol and P.P.E.”
Presenting their business model to potential backers requires finesse. Investors aren’t worried about hygiene, though; rather, they express concern that Biobot’s customers are government agencies, which tend to change their plans based on political exigencies. But Ghaeli is excited about all the new data to be gleaned from what people flush down their toilets. “It’s about our health and well-being in general,” she said. “It’s about understanding nutrition disparities in communities, understanding stress levels, pervasive infectious diseases like influenza or Zika virus.” She paused. “Really, the applications are endless.” ♦
