The COVID-19 pandemic has mainstreamed wastewater-based epidemiology, which analyzes sewage to detect disease outbreaks. Biobot Analytics can identify current community levels of disease and opioid use from just 150 ml of an aggregate sewage sample from a 24-hour period. Because samples include everyone in a sewage system, “there’s an incredible amount of intelligence in wastewater,” says Newsha Ghaeli, Biobot’s president and co-founder. The company is the first to commercialize data from sewage. The CDC in September expanded Biobot’s contract to include monkeypox monitoring.
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