Eric Barker’s blog on dealing with an earlier pandemic is the kind of writing that fuels the sort of intracompany chat that happens now on Slack or email, rather than with a tea or coffee in the office (it’s a good read, so do follow the prior link and then come back, and you are welcome to join the Slack platform).
Getting back to actual work, US insurer American Family has made its latest* AmFam Institute impact investment, in Biobot Analytics, a technology company that deploys wastewater monitoring equipment and analytical tools to provide novel public health insights at the community level. The link for those not reading Eric’s post is that the UK’s 1854 cholera outbreak was traced to a water pump now restored to its original spot outside a pub, so everyone can touch it again in a perhaps misplaced ironic gesture. Meanwhile, using anonymous data collected from sewage, Biobot’s platform can trace health indicators that provide insights into drug use and the presence of viruses, environmental contaminants and nutrition.
Biobot started with an opioid analytics program helping officials reduce overdoses by 40% and then expanded to Covid-19 activities in a paper finding S-COV-2 titers in wastewater are higher than expected from clinically confirmed cases.
From following hunches and using shoe leather in 19th century London to trace a disease, to a smart PhD in Mariana Matus out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) being able to scale nationally with top tier backers in DCVC, Y Combinator, MIT’s Engine fund and AmFam to meet today’s challenges, the future lies in innovation, capital and the judicious use of history.
John McIntyre from AmFam wrote in to say “BioBot is our ninth company to join our portfolio across four investment areas”
