A Cambridge wastewater analytics company is working with the White House to analyze wastewater data that helps monitoring drug use nationwide.
Biobot Analytics is providing the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy with wastewater data from communities across the country to help identify emerging substance use trends. Federal spending records show the project began in September 2025 under a one-year contract worth $615,700.
Wastewater epidemiology analyzes sewage samples at treatment facilities where researchers can estimate levels of drugs such as fentanyl or cocaine used across entire cities.
“The goal of wastewater epidemiology is to understand community-level health,” said Marisa Donnelly, director of epidemiology at Biobot Analytics. “If you want to know how healthy a community is, you can look at wastewater to understand what viruses, pathogens or substances are circulating.”
Compared with traditional public health reporting methods, the biggest advantage of wastewater data is speed. Because traces of substances appear in sewage shortly after they are metabolized, researchers can detect changes in community drug use within days.
“If you’re a local health department trying to track overdoses in your community, you might not get those numbers until months later by clinical reports or toxicology data,” Donnelly said. “With wastewater, we can see those trends within business days, allowing communities to understand what’s changing much earlier than traditional data sources.”
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency’s National Wastewater Surveillance System collects data from about 1,500 monitoring sites across the country each week. Biobot’s federal partnership focuses specifically on tracking substances linked to drug use, including opioids such as fentanyl and stimulant drugs.
Cambridge Day reached out to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy to ask how Biobot was selected and what the agency hopes to achieve through the partnership, but did not receive a response.
Biobot, founded by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and based in Cambridge, has analyzed wastewater samples for public health monitoring in Massachusetts.
“We have a network of sites in Massachusetts that we work with regularly, and those communities send us wastewater samples that we analyze to track trends,” Donnelly said. “Expanding that network is really important so that communities across the country are represented and can see what’s happening in their own data.”
Donnelly said the data can help public health officials detect shifts in drug consumption earlier and decide where treatment resources may be needed most, rather than responding only after problems emerge.
“Sharing that data nationally allows public health partners to see changes in substance use earlier and respond more quickly,” she said.
Because wastewater samples are collected at treatment facilities serving thousands of residents, the data reflects trends across entire communities rather than individual behavior.
“Wastewater is inherently anonymous,” Donnelly said. “When we sample at a wastewater treatment facility, we’re collecting wastewater from thousands of people at once, so we can’t identify individuals. We can only track trends in community substance use.”
Beyond drug monitoring, wastewater analysis can also track a range of infectious diseases circulating in communities. Researchers can test sewage for viruses such as influenza, respiratory syncytial virus and measles, allowing public health officials to monitor outbreaks even when many cases go unreported.
“Wastewater is probably best known for how it was used to track COVID-19,” Donnelly said. “People shed viruses through bodily fluids even before symptoms appear, which means wastewater can sometimes detect rising infection levels before cases appear in traditional reporting systems.”
As wastewater monitoring expands nationwide, public health officials may increasingly use the technology to identify emerging health threats, from infectious disease outbreaks to shifts in drug use.
“What wastewater really gives us is a way to see what’s happening in community health in near real time,” Donnelly said. “Our goal has always been to give communities a clearer, faster picture of what’s happening in their population’s health.”
This story is part of a partnership between Cambridge Day and the Boston University Department of Journalism.
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