metabonose

metabonose aims to detect pandemics at the earliest time and precisely track the spreading in time. metabonose utilize a smart home device to measure & track some key human gut microbiota metabolites in fecal smell. by integrating individual's longitudal gut microbiota metabolites data at the community, city or higher level, disease outbreak and spreading pattern can be digged out in near real-time. 

if each family, office buildings and other commerical & public places of each city are installed our device, novel public health crisis can be easily spotted from the population temporal gut microbiota trend map, as long as the crisis will change human gut microbiota. as a result, infected individuals can be precisely targeted, infected areas can be precisely quarantined, the impact on economy and people's quality of life can be minimized.

obviously traditional disease surveillance system failed to respond a novel pandemic like Covid-19 effectively. 

on one hand, current surveillance system can not provide early warning for novel disease outbreak. according to study, it took more than 45 days for traditional surveillance system to trigger outbreak alarm in China. US studies also revealed surveillance system lagged 3 to 6 weeks to detect the virus.
on the other hand, current surveillance system can not precisely track the spreading in real time. it needs large scale diagnostic screening for asymptomatic patients and infected communities. the whole city population nucleic acid screening in Wuhan almost cost  $200 million. it's also estimated that it will cost US $44 billion for Covid-19 testing a year. according to Harvard university research, the city lock-down and healthcare problems caused by Covid-19 will cost US $16 trillion totally. 
the world urgently needs a new public health surveillance system to early detect outbreak and precisely track the spreading in near real-time.

The microbiome can be used as a biomarker particularly for nearly all forms of infectious disease monitoring and diagnosis. for example, Covid-19 virus will make the similar transient gut microbiota changes from infection to different day post infection to recover after virus clearance regardless of the individualized baseline.  based on these findings, metabonose is developing a smart device to track the temporal gut microbiome change at community or population level. unlike current time-consuming sequencing technology which measure microbiota composition, metabonose focus on microbiota functions. metabonose device will be mounted on the toilet seat. when people defecate, the AI algorithm-enhanced gas sensors inside the device will measure 12 key gut microbiota volatile metabolites in real-time. with fingerprint recognization on the device, each individual's longtitude data can be stored accurately. 

if government deploy metabonose device in each community family, public and commercial buildings, a real-time population gut microbiota trend map will be created. by clustering algorithm, if certain numbers of different individual show the same changing pattern within the same(or neighboring) period, it could be a early warning sign of disease outbreak for investigation. meanwhile, the gut microbiota spatial changing map will precisely reflect the spreading of the infection in near real-time.

metabonose mainly targets adult people since adults have relative stable gut microbiota under normal circumstances. that means it will be much easier to discover the abnormal pattern in the adult microbiota when confronting infectious diseases. 

Covid-19 negatively impact everyone's quality of life in a great way. massive nucleic acid screening, masking, social distance, contact tracing and city lockdown changed everyone's daily life and cause many mental&physical health problems. meanwhile, asympotomatic carriers and recovered patients still possess great threats to the around people including themseleves without good monitoring tools. according to survey, in January 2021, 41% of adults reported symptoms of anxiety and/or depressive disorder. life expectancy has dropped by at least 1.7 years which is the United States' largest decline in annual life expectancy since World War II.
if metabonose infrastructure is ready, surveillance can be seamlessly integrated into people's daily life in non-invasive and contactless way. spread tracking and isolation can be precisely implemented at the individual level. we don't need undifferentiated screening, social distance and lockdown. only infected patients will be accurately clustered in a quarantine zone, and the rest people will continue their normal daily life without any difference.

metabonose proposes a disruptive technology-based bottom-up surveillance tool to cope with future public health crisis. metabonose's smart home device becomes an automous self-reporting machine of each citizen. all the testing and processing are non-invasive, contactless, automatic and continuous. any population level gut microbiota changing will be timely catched by the system and translated into early warning and disease spreading information for decision maker to investigate furtherly. 

although we have complete the hardware & electronics design, metabonose is still in developing the core algorithm to train the gas sensor to successfully measure the key metabolites we want. so far, we only complete 70% prototype.

metabonose will bring an innovative pandemic surveillance tool through these dimensions:

1. far better humanization. most current surveillance tools are intrusive to disturb human's normal life. on the contrary, metabonose is seamless integrated into people's daily life in non-invasive and automatic way.
2. far more precised targeting. unlike current top-down surveillance approach, metabonose is bottom-up approach. the disease outbreak signal will naturally emerge from the individualized continuous monitoring. meanwhile, the infectious source and spreading route can be easily visualized since metabnose can target at individual level.
3. far lower cost. metabonose device use very low cost hardware. the cost comes from infrastructure deployment and clouding computing. unlike current surveillance technology, metabonose does not have expensive costs such as testing material, manpower etc. 
4. far more universal and adapting. gut microbiota will have different changing pattern when human body is infected by different virus. all these changes will be catched by the metabolites. that means metabonose device can handle any novel disease outbreak as long as the disease impacts the gut microbiota. however, current antibody or nucleic acid testing have to undergo new development for the testing kits to handle any new disease.
5. continuous and near real-time. since metabonose surveillance automatically happens when people make defecation, it guarantees that the surveillance can be continuous and near real-time.

currently metabonose is in prototype development. no users so far.

in one year after product is ready, we expect to serve ~2000 adults in 5 communities which locates in east, south, west, north and cener area of the city. 
in 5 years, we strive to serve ~1000000 adults in ~30 cities.

we will use 2 indicators to measure the progress.

1. one is coverage percentage. we have to build enough nodes for a successful surveillance network in one city. each city has its own minimum nodes. we will use the coverage percentages of the nodes which are installed the device to measure the surveillance completeness.
2. another is refreshing rate. our surveillance performance depends on the continuous data streaming from each individual. since normal adult makes defecation daily, the data refreshing rate is similar as well. by monitoring this refreshing rate, on one hand, we can ensure the data quality to guarantee the surveillance reliability, on the other hand, this rate reflects the user engagement and help us to evaluate user's interest in our service. therefore, we can replicate rapidly to achieve one million users in 5 years.

metabonose has 1 full-time staff and 3 part-time staffs.

solving public health problems needs cross-disciplined talents. Our team converges gas sensor, hardware and microbiology professionals.

CEO：Liang Zhang, +15 years experiences in semicon and nano gas sensor industry. He started career in SMIC which is the largest IC foundry in China, then he worked for ASML which is the No.1 photolithography equipment supplier to IC. In 2014, he worked with a US carbon nanotube sensor startup on early lung cancer diagnostics based on human breath VOCs. From Jul 2017 to Aug 2018, he worked as director of China operations for AerNos, a US nano gas sensor startup.
product architect: Chao Fu, +13 years experiences in embed system. He started career in NEC, worked in Japan, shanghai and Hangzhou office. Great contribution to several projects from embedded system to cloud computing and big data. After NEC, he worked as R&D director in intelligent medical research center of B-soft which is a public listed medical software company in China. He was responsible for developing clinical artificial intelligent decision system.
Chief scientist: Fei Cai, + 15 years experiences in biology research. She has PhD in biochemical. She was UC Berkeley post-doc and associate specialist. and she worked as project scientist in US Lowrance Berkeley national lab. Currently she is senior scientific researcher in Genentech.
business development: Hao Song, + 15 years experiences in consumer electronics marketing and supply chain. He spent 15 years in Lenovo  and was ASEAN executive director of consumer business, built billion sales revenue for laptop business from scratch. 

to be honest, we don't have good practice on this field because we are too small. our chief scientist is female. when we did industrial and app design, we turned to foreign designers to make our product and service to fit different cultures. 

1. to overcome the barriers in financial and social mindset we will face in the coming next year

2. to get suggestion, feedback and mentor on our solution from different background people

3. to change the world by telling our bold and radical idea to the impact-minded leaders

1. we expect to get few top AI algorithm talents onboard. we think MIT is a perfect place to scout.

2. the seed money is critical for building a pilot project to demonstrate our solution. MIT SOLVE could connect the right financial partner to us.

1. scientific institutes in public health such as MIT media lab, Harvard T.H. Chan school of public health etc.

2. NGO for public health in nutrition or disease prevention etc.

3. gas sensor/enose companies such as c2sense, aroma bit, aryballe, stratuscent,  etc.

metabonose can provide personalized gut microbiota health management to individuals including US consumers. balanced gut microbiota can greatly help people to step away or recover from chronic diseases

metabonose utilizes AI to enhance sensor performance to build a disruptive surveillance tool. this tool will greatly bring humanization to the world when the world confront pandemics.

since metabonose's surveillance network can map out the individuals of covid-19 infected communities, on one hand, metabonose can help to plan and optimize the life-saving resources allocation synchronizing the disease spreading; on the other hand, the health worker and users are metabonose users as well. they can easily report/update the stocks anytime using our mobile apps.

if we can get the funding, we will use the fund to develop a SaaS module built-in metabonose user apps for health worker, users and supply chain.