Vitrail is building the specimen infrastructure to unlock continuous, population-scale epidemiological data from sanitary and incontinence waste streams — a biological resource that is currently collected, transported, and incinerated without ever being analysed.
Sanitary products and incontinence pads contain clinically informative biological material: nucleic acids, pathogen signatures, pharmacogenomic markers. These specimens are already collected at population scale through established waste management infrastructure — serviced by contractors operating regular collection routes across workplaces, care homes, hospitals, and public facilities.
No new specimen collection behaviour is required. No individual diagnostic action is demanded. The logistics already exist. What is missing is the analytical layer.
Every public health system shares one problem: their surveillance data only captures people who show up to a clinic. Vitrail provides the first attendance-independent signal.
The majority of STIs are asymptomatic — over 50% of chlamydia and gonorrhoea cases present no symptoms — making them invisible to clinic-based surveillance. Vitrail detects pathogen DNA before clinical presentations spike.
An estimated 53 million unsewered Americans are invisible to the National Wastewater Surveillance System. Vitrail resolves which facility harbours resistance — attribution that sewage sampling structurally cannot provide.
Directors of Public Health commission STI services using only clinic attendance data — missing the asymptomatic majority. Vitrail would provide the first community-level prevalence signal for chlamydia and gonorrhoea, enabling needs-based commissioning to replace historical budget allocations. Gonorrhoea notifications are at record highs; AMR strains are rising.
UTI hospitalisations cost NHS hospitals £604M in 2023–24, concentrated in the elderly. Vitrail detects silent AMR colonisation — invisible until invasive infection. Facility-specific resistance profiles enable targeted prescribing and reduce avoidable admissions.
Approximately 20% of pregnant women carry Group B Streptococcus (RCOG). The UK relies on risk factors alone — missing carriers. Borough-level prevalence data from Vitrail could support the case for targeted screening pilots and inform local maternity safety strategies.
Weekly collection cannot catch individual outbreaks — but monitoring 30+ nurseries detects rising pathogen trends borough-wide before any facility has cases. Seasonal early warning for pre-emptive IPC guidance.
Studies estimate 40–75% of nursing home antibiotics are unnecessary or inappropriate (CDC). Vitrail gives each facility a resistance profile — enabling targeted prescribing and measurable reductions in avoidable hospitalisations.
Vitrail intercepts discrete solid waste at the point of collection — before incineration — and transforms it into a structured, anonymised biological data resource. We are building the equivalent of a UK Biobank for population-level pathogen and pharmacogenomic intelligence, layered onto waste logistics that already run daily.
Partnering with waste management contractors who already service tens of thousands of sanitary waste bins on fixed collection schedules. No new touchpoints. No behaviour change.
Multiplexed nucleic acid detection for high-value targets: sexually transmitted infections, antimicrobial resistance genes, and pharmacogenomic variants — extracted from dried biological material on discarded products.
Anonymised, site-level epidemiological intelligence delivered to public health bodies, NHS screening programmes, and pharmaceutical real-world evidence teams. Longitudinal. Continuous. Scalable.
The COVID-19 pandemic validated population-level biological surveillance through wastewater. Multiplexed molecular assay costs have deflated by orders of magnitude. Waste management consolidation has created national-scale logistics partners. Real-world evidence demand from pharma is at an all-time high. Vitrail sits at the intersection of all four.
Vitrail handles pooled, anonymised waste — not individual specimens. No personal identifiers are collected, no individual consent is required, and no diagnostic results are returned to individuals. All data is processed at the site level, designed to comply with UK GDPR and the Common Law Duty of Confidentiality from the outset.
Our analytical pipeline will be developed in consultation with public health regulators and ethics advisors to ensure alignment with UKHSA data-sharing frameworks, NHS information governance standards, and the regulatory requirements governing environmental surveillance in healthcare settings.
Marco founded Vitrail after recognising that a vast, untapped biological specimen stream — discrete sanitary and incontinence waste — is incinerated daily across thousands of facilities, carrying population-level health signals that current surveillance systems do not capture.
His career spans the full translational arc from field epidemiology to commercial product development across three countries. He began with population-level research — a seroprevalence study in rural Mexico — before moving into cellular and molecular biology and regulated industry. He completed a Wellcome Trust–funded PhD at the Francis Crick Institute (UCL), held a research appointment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, established the Translational Medicine laboratory at bit.bio — contributing to MHRA regulatory submissions — and developed organ-on-chip assay platforms at CN-Bio Innovations for research products and CRO activities.
He holds a BSc in Genomic Sciences from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
If you work in public health, waste management, pharmaceutical real-world evidence, or early-stage investment, we would welcome a conversation.
hello@vitrail.health