The COVID-19 epidemic highlighted a need to monitor the spread of disease in communities. Untap are creating technology that leverages the hidden data in sewage to detect the presence of viruses before symptoms present. By doing this, it can help stop viral transmission in its tracks, keeping people healthy and companies fully staffed. In the short term, they plan to use this to reduce infection rates locally, but their long-term vision is to give people a tool to understand possible risks to their own health. They have started with COVID-19 and influenza, and then are adding other viruses such as norovirus and emergent viruses. Longer term they want to monitor a whole host of pathogens including stress, E.Coli, MRSA, and even some cancers. As they describe it, “keeping people safer, with crap data.”
Dr Claire Trant FRSA, is the CEO and co-founder of Untap. She leads on business strategy, investor relations, customer development, hiring, financial management, and marketing. She says that “the past two years of founding and establishing a company have made me realise how much I don’t know. Working on innovative technology by its nature means that there will always be a sea of unknowns.” She sees the Shott Scale up Accelerator as a way to allow her to do this and enhance her skills as a leader of a company. She also sees this as a route to encourage more women to seek out these less appealing but fascinating sectors.
Claire recognises that the award is ideally timed to extend Untap’s product offering to more than just COVID-19, allowing them to prove they are more than just a ‘pandemic company’. She is aware that the company has limited business to business sales experience, and the Shott Scale up Accelerator comes at an ideal time in the company’s growth to help build the brand and deliver these materials to new customers.
Monitoring population health by analysing individual blood or saliva samples is expensive, invasive, and difficult. This means outbreaks aren’t detected until symptoms when transmission has already occurred. The annual cost of this from influenza and norovirus is estimated £36 billion in the UK and the US, plus the immeasurable future cost of COVID-19. This is further fuelled by increased risk of another outbreak such as COVID-19. Untap aim to make sewage surveillance commonplace for public health monitoring to better inform decisions about public health.
