Biobot fights to keep CDC contract
Firm tracks sewage data for COVID-19
Cambridge-based Biobot Analytics conducts sewage tests in hundreds of communities nationwide to track the spread of COVID-19 and other diseases. But the company found itself out in the cold in September after the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave its waste-water testing contract to Verily Life Sciences, a medical data subsidiary of tech giant Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
It was a major blow to Biobot, which has since laid off 35 percent of its workforce. But the company is fighting back, by filing a contract dispute in October with the US Government Accountability Office. A ruling in the case is due in late January, and until the matter is resolved, Verily will not begin collecting sewage data from the sites now monitored by Biobot. These account for 25 percent of the nation’s waste-water tracking sites.
Biobot chief executive Mariana Matus declined to comment on the specifics of the dispute, but said any gaps in data collection aren’t the fault of her company. “It is not within the purview of Biobot to give a stop-work order,” Matus said in an interview. “It’s the decision of the GAO.”
In fact, said Matus, Biobot has continued to collect waste-water data from two-thirds of the company’s 250 test sites in 150 US counties. These include many sites covered by the federal contract, but Biobot has continued running tests at its own expense.
“We are still reporting on the data we are collecting, via our public dashboard,” Matus said.
In any case, enough test data is still being collected nationwide to provide a reasonably accurate measure of COVID incidence, said Michael Hoerger, associate professor of psychology, psychiatry, and oncology at Tulane University, who is active in COVID tracking.
And Biobot still has testing contracts
with a number of state and local governments. The company works with the City of Boston and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to monitor waste water in more than 70 locations in Massachusetts, covering 50 percent of the state. This work is unaffected by the CDC contract dispute.
The GAO, Verily, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not immediately return calls and emails seeking comment on the contract and its financial terms.
Founded in 2017 as a spinoff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Biobot was originally launched as a way to monitor drug abuse by measuring levels of opioids in sewage. The company changed its focus to COVID tracking in 2020, and also tests sewage for the presence of the virus that causes Mpox.