Name: How sewage can help warn of a disease outbreak
Uploaded: 2020-10-14
Duration: 4 min 59 s
Description: Newsha Ghaeli, co-founder and president of Biobot Analytics, explains.

 SPEAKER 1: Obviously, this has implications currently with COVID. Newsha, can you talk a little bit about how this is being applied today, where it's being used, and how early can this be used to detect outbreaks before they happen? NEWSHA GHAELI: Yeah. Absolutely. So when we first started the company back in 2017, we were focused on a very different public health challenge, the opioid epidemic. But human health is dynamic. Things change. So with much of the rest of the world, our attention shifted to COVID-19 in February, so early this year. That was around the same time that researchers had noted that the Sars-COV2 virus, so the novel coronavirus, was actually shed in the stool of infected patients. And so we knew that, theoretically, we could find the virus in wastewater. And so together with collaborators at MIT and Harvard, we set off and were ultimately the first team in the US to successfully detect and quantify the virus. And from there, we really grew this technique, this application, to work with over 400 communities across the US, representing over 10% of the US population, generating samples on a daily basis-- sorry-- on a weekly basis. So on a weekly basis, we're understanding the concentration of this virus in wastewater and how it's trending in different communities. SPEAKER 1: So what does that mean today? Has it already been used to alert communities or regions to potential outbreaks? Newsha, do you want to take that? NEWSHA GHAELI: Yeah. Sure. So you know, one of the things that we've seen over the last several months hold true across a lot of the different communities that we work with is that data from wastewater is a leading indicator of new cases to be reported anywhere between 5 to 10 days in advance. And the reason for this is that we suspect that infected individuals are shedding the virus in stool within days of being infected. So that's many days before individuals present with clinical symptoms, choose to go get tested, and then receive those test results back. So a lot of the communities that we're working with are actually generating this data as part of a much larger COVID-19 response, or toolkit, or framework as a leading indicator for how the overall health of their community is doing with respect to this COVID outbreak. SPEAKER 1: So you started in opioids. You've pivoted to COVID. Where else can this take you? Where else can you apply it? And I just want to point out that you have used the word stool so you're being very scientific about this. NEWSHA GHAELI: So. OK I'll try that-- I'll try that again. So we can really look at anything that's excreted in pee and poop. So anything that at the individual level-- almost anything that at the individual level that our doctors can look at, we can start building the same technology to start looking for that in wastewater. So for example, we can move to other infectious diseases, such as influenza. Imagine every flu season having a flu tracker, an early warning that can alert communities to flu outbreaks within a certain geographic footprint. Norovirus. So things that are much more commonplace than COVID-19 but an early warning would just help a certain location or community better prepare. We can look at other types of health indicators such as stress and build a stress index for certain communities looking at things like cortisol. And then, of course, there is the opioid product that we were and are still working on with some communities where we're really able to understand very specific to certain types of communities what are the types of drugs that are most commonly consumed so that public health departments, public health agencies, can be more tailored and more effective in their interventions. The opioid epidemic is not a one size fits all problem. And solutions are not going to be one size fits all across the country. 

How sewage can help warn of a disease outbreak

Newsha Ghaeli of Biobot Analytics explains.

Newsha Ghaeli, co-founder and president of Biobot Analytics, explains.