Biobot Analytics

Biobot Analytics is a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that measures what people excrete by testing sewage. It began in 2017 as a spinout of a research project at MIT and describes itself as the "pioneer and global leader in wastewater epidemiology".^[1][2] It became widely known in 2020, when it tested for the new coronavirus in sewage, and in 2022 the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chose it to expand the national wastewater surveillance system.^[3][2]

Mariana Matus, the chief executive, is described on the company's site as having pioneered the science of wastewater epidemiology in her doctoral studies at MIT. Newsha Ghaeli, the president, had been a research fellow at the MIT Senseable City Lab.^[1] The company says it works on "which pathogens and substances are circulating at the community level, never who is carrying them".^[1]

Staff of Biobot were among the authors of a paper posted as a preprint on April 7, 2020, and published in mSystems that August. It reported SARS-CoV-2 in raw sewage from a major urban treatment facility in Massachusetts. Samples collected from March 18 to 25 contained the virus at high titers by RT-qPCR, and sequencing confirmed that the amplified product was the virus. The number of infected people implied by the titers was orders of magnitude greater than the number of confirmed cases. The preprint said that the reason for the discrepancy was not yet clear and that the data did not necessarily show the clinical estimates to be wrong.^[4][3] The company's site says it "provided the first detection of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater in the U.S. in early 2020".^[1]

The method has older roots. Poliovirus was recovered from sewage in 1939, in a paper titled "Poliomyelitic virus in sewage".^[5] The Biosurveillance article follows the line from there to the programs of the 2020s.

On May 10, 2022, Biobot announced that the CDC had selected it to expand the National Wastewater Surveillance System, with the aim of enrolling 500 communities over the following year, for SARS-CoV-2.^[2] The contract was extended in February 2023.^[6] According to the Boston Globe, the CDC ended it that year and awarded a new one to Verily in July 2023.^[7]

By 2026 the company was working with communities and agencies in 40 states. Its work includes metagenomic sequencing, which identifies the viruses and microbes in a sample without choosing them in advance, and it says that a single sample can reveal more than 1,500 human and animal viruses. In June 2026 it opened a public dashboard that tracked wastewater in 11 cities, Boston among them, during the soccer World Cup.^[7]

The Boston Globe reported on July 4, 2026, that Massachusetts would let its contract with Biobot end on July 31 and run its own testing through the State Public Health Laboratory, at 12 treatment plants in place of 60. The paper's subhead summed it up: "Biobot proved waste water surveillance was valuable enough that governments now want to do it themselves." Maine, Rhode Island, Ohio, Wisconsin and Missouri had built or expanded in-house programs.^[7]

Molecular Reality Corporation proposes small sensors in homes, sinks and drains.^[8] Biobot's Massachusetts program covered 60 sites.^[7] The company's field guide says of its own sensors: "Today we have one instrument in one lab."^[9]

• Biosurveillance
• Virus detection with nanopores
• Wastewater surveillance