Mapping Community Opioid Exposure Through Wastewater-Based Epidemiology as a Means to Engage Pharmacies in Harm Reduction Efforts
Preventing Chronic Disease - Claire Duvallet et al.
Our technology generates public health data that is naturally anonymized yielding unprecedented insight into the health of communities without collecting personal identifiable information.
Wastewater epidemiology was first pioneered in Israel, Europe, and Australia by various academic research collaborations and has been demonstrated as an early warning system for poliovirus. Currently, the most well-known group is the European SCORE network, which is sponsored by the European Union to measure country-level drug consumption across the EU. Developed in the United States at MIT, our methods build on top of this body of work allowing this technology to be commercialized for the first time. Our Co-founder and CEO developed this scientific innovation during her PhD work at MIT, and is one of a few experts in the United States in this scientific field.
Our system differs from prior work in three important ways:
We collect our samples at manholes in the city and wastewater treatment facilities. This approach enables direct measurement of metabolites, viruses, and bacteria excreted by humans.
We're built to deliver results in a 3-day turnaround time. This is possible because we are dedicated full-time to delivering an efficient service through automation technology.
Our system can measure drug consumption, infectious disease outbreaks, antibiotic resistance, nutrition, and exposure to environmental contaminants in populations creating a holistic early warning system for public health crises.