An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile.Mariana Matus was working on a Ph.D. in sewage. A grad student at MIT, she was sifting through wastewater — from a building, a neighborhood, a city — for bits of viruses. The data could then be used toMatus thought so, too. Even before she had her degree, she went hunting for investors to turn the idea into a company.
Private capital has been eyeing public health for years. But after COVID hit, the money rushed in for real. In 2019, venture deals with a pandemic preparedness component totaled $4.8 billion, according to the research group PitchBook. In 2021, they soared to $13.8 billion. This time, Silicon Valley is confident that the profit motive will supercharge public health. All they need is the right business model — and some government handouts.
But the Kleiner fund did have one major outcome. The partners who led it, Brook Byers and Beth Seidenberg, lobbied the feds to create an agency to hand out grants to early-stage biotech innovations. Coming up with drugs and other therapies to fight pandemics is really expensive, so Kleiner helped persuade the government to use taxpayer money to underwrite the costs of the kind of work that the firm wanted to invest in.
The problem, as she saw it back then, wasn't limited to getting tests approved and pushed out to people. It was how the results of those tests would get analyzed and turned into action."We need the PCR tests to have real-time data on the rate of spread in communities," she told me when I spoke with her in April 2020."Quite frankly, we are building plans assuming there will be widespread serological testing, even though it isn't here yet.
It turned out, she says, that the things VCs wanted were what she was hoping to build, too — they just used different language to describe them."In 2019 I would have described it as public health, protecting the community, being accountable to taxpayers," Dean says."Today I would describe it as asset protection for business continuity, where economic security is tightly linked with health security.
Some pandemic-related startups, like Biobot, are content to target government as their primary customer. When I suggest to Matus that big universities might want to use her wastewater data to identify which dorms were starting to pop with meningitis or norovirus, she smiles and nods in a way that suggests people smarter and richer than me have already run that notion by her.
We'll, first let's not pretend the CDC wasn't used for propaganda by the government.
Trump CDC RESPONSE TO COVID WAS A DISASTER BECAUSE HE DISALLOWED THEM TO SPEAK THE TRUTH. There, I fixed it for you.
It’s that people still listen to the cdc. That is a disaster
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