HIBT Lab! Biobot Analytics: Mariana Matus and Newsha Ghaeli
How I Built This with Guy Raz
Guy Raz | Wondery
4.7 • 31.4K Ratings
🗓️ 2 February 2023
⏱️ 38 minutes
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Summary
Biobot Analytics founders Mariana Matus and Newsha Ghaeli first met in a poop lab. Yep, you read that correctly...
Their company has been working with government and corporate clients since 2017 to analyze disease levels and other biomarkers in our wastewater. Their insights have been used to predict spikes in Covid and other infections, help local officials address drug use in their communities, and much more.
This week on How I Built This Lab, Mariana and Newsha talk with Guy about the innovation that can happen at the intersection of disciplines — Mariana is a scientist from Mexico, Newsha an architect from Canada. The women also share their vision for a future where cities better leverage the ‘data centers’ of our sewers to address chronic health issues and prepare for future pandemics.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:07.0 | Download the app today. |
| 0:09.4 | This is Chip Rantley, co-host of the NPR Podcast White Lives. |
| 0:13.4 | Before we found the man in Vancouver, before we sued the State Department, before we snuck |
| 0:18.1 | into the graveyard of a federal penitentiary, all we had were the photographs. |
| 0:23.4 | Photographs of a group of Cuban men standing on the roof of a prison in rural Alabama. |
| 0:27.5 | That's the season on the NPR Podcast White Lives. |
| 0:57.5 | And so about five years ago, two women in Boston won a biologist named Mariana Matus, the |
| 1:03.6 | other in Architect, Nusia Gaeli, got together to start a company to analyze sewage, and |
| 1:09.6 | to find out whether they could detect things like diseases and viral outbreaks in specific |
| 1:14.9 | communities. |
| 1:15.9 | Now, it turns out you can, and you can find out a whole bunch of other things by looking |
| 1:20.8 | at wastewater, for example, opioid usage. |
| 1:24.3 | Mariana Nusia's company, called Biobot Analytics, works with public health agencies and even |
| 1:29.7 | some private companies to help them understand how to get ahead of potential crises like a |
| 1:34.9 | new outbreak of COVID. |
| 1:37.9 | Let's start with how the two of you met. |
| 1:42.7 | Tell me how you guys met. |
| 1:44.5 | Yeah, so we met back in 2014. |
| 1:48.2 | So I was at MIT, I was doing a PhD in computational biology, and I was working in a poop lab. |
| 1:58.2 | A poop lab? |
| 1:59.2 | Yes. |
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