HIBT Lab! Biobot Analytics: Mariana Matus and Newsha Ghaeli

How I Built This · 9 Feb 2023 · 37m

What this episode covers

Biobot Analytics founders Mariana Matus, a computational biologist, and Newsha Ghaeli, an architect, explain how they commercialized wastewater epidemiology to detect diseases and drug use in communities. They describe their early research at MIT, where they overcame initial failures in flu detection by optimizing sampling protocols, and detail their business model serving government agencies like the CDC and private enterprise clients. The founders discuss raising capital for a novel B2G model, the technical challenges of extracting biomarkers from sewage, and their vision for a global network of sewer data to improve public health and sanitation infrastructure.

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