The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Email. in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and Ph.D. in biology from Yale University. Winning the award for healthcare innovation. A newly discovered chemical problem was causing a high rate of invalid teststhat is, tests that registered the presence of neither viral nor human genetic material. In late May, he told me that I was welcome to join the ship in port, as long as I was prepared to arrive by car rather than by plane. He compares it to the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test in terms of effectiveness and claims that it is more accurate than an antibody or antigen test. Dr. Jonathan Rothberg is the founder of multiple life science and medical device companies including Butterfly Network, Hyperfine and the 4Catalyzer incubator. The nephew whod stowed away on the Gene Machine in the spring had recently gone off to his freshman year in college, in Miami; within a week, there were infections on the two floors above him, and before he knew it he was isolated in a hotel room. -. Once registered, youll receive our Daily Edition email for free. His mind was in some Aegean port, and he didnt seem to notice the vicious clouds of stinging gnats. I have absolute confidence that the Detect product will be a success: more important than just its impact on the [coronavirus] pandemic is the possibility of using this platform for other endemic and epidemic outbreaks in the future.. Please update your browser or switch to Chrome, Firefox or Safari. But, when signs indicate that the virus is under control, it could get people out of their homes and moving again. Youre telling me that the kids are responsible and not the school? he said. (Courtesy), Jonathan Rothbergs portable MRI machine. The fact that his yacht is named GENE MACHINE provides a clue about the direction of both his science and his business. Rothberg decided that a good way to use his talents in the pandemic response was to develop a home coronavirus test. Silicon Valley arrives in Guilford as inventor unveils at-home and Hes recruiting volunteers for a clinical trial, pursuing the initial goal of emergency-use authorization. Rothberg says he got interested in ultrasound technology because his oldest daughter, now a college student, has tuberous sclerosis. He worked on his next company, Ion Torrent, in stealth mode for two years. Options depend on your purchase amount, and a down payment may be required. Where would the students go to wait, and what would they do for that half hour? in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.S., M.Phil, and Ph.D. in biology from Yale University. The ocean is a mysterious place, says Elana, now 17 and a rising senior at Choate-Rosemary Hall. When Rothberg bought his eldest daughter a watch that was supposed to warn of seizures, it produced so many false alarms that he decided to throw it away and start his own epilepsy firm. Lets let people see their families for the holiday. The pessimism was taken for granted: if people like him werent going to save you, who would? The Homodeus kitseach encased in its own minimalist silver-foil packaging, like an extra-large Capri Sun juice packwere complete, but the actual reagents had been replaced with dummy fluids. Rapid tests, which were still being conducted on Abbotts I.D. From 1999 to 2007, Dr. Rothberg co-founded and served as Chairman of ClarifI, Inc., and from 1999 to 2006, he founded and served as Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer of 454 Life Sciences Corporation. Person Details. Abbott said that the findings were not consistent with other studies, and the White House continued to rely on them.) Thats why we started the Times of Israel ten years ago - to provide discerning readers like you with must-read coverage of Israel and the Jewish world. The process, however, is embedded in a vast infrastructure: labs depend on complex supply chains for materials and reagents, and samples must be collected and distributed throughout a network of depots for processing. 2023 Cond Nast. Dr. Rothberg is a scientist and entrepreneur who was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the nations highest honor for technological achievement, by President Obama for inventing and commercializing high-speed DNA sequencing. [2][28] In 2002, the couple started the nonprofit Rothberg Institute for Childhood Diseases which works on treatments for tuberous sclerosis, a rare disease that affects one of their children. The company is working to get the Butterfly iQ ultrasound scanner into the hands of as many medical professionals as possible. Kaye-Kauderer told me that Rothbergs instructions to his team were no pipetting, no nasopharyngeal swabs, no refrigerated enzymes, no liquid transferwe had to keep the whole thing hermetically sealed, end to end. Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell, in New York, and a member of Homodeuss scientific advisory board, told me that such one-pot solutions are trickyother scientists, he said, have tried and failed. Butterfly iQ is a registered trademark of Butterfly Network, Inc. 2023 Blue Cross Blue Shield Association - All Rights Reserved. No other machines. Over the next forty-eight hours, Rothberg live-tweeted the creation of a new enterprise, tracing his thought experiment with a steady but haphazard accretion of technical detail, earnest self-promotion, and premptive networking. He previously served as Chairman of Butterfly's board of directors from March 2014 to February 2021, Butterfly's Chief Executive Officer from March 2014 to April 2020, and Butterfly's . How vials of frozen, genetically engineered rodentsperm, raced to a remote lab in Maine, produced a breed of critters that could help scientists find a treatment or a vaccine. He is offering this to the local community as well. Inspired by both the utility and the limitations of EEG (electroencephalogram), Liminal has invented AEG, a new modality that combines blood flow measurement with the existing technology that monitors the electrical activity of the brain. Detect is designed for use at your office, workplace, school and, down the line, even your home.. Hed give us hints, like what to do with the project, how to get the DNA out of the water, Elena recalled. Dr. Rothberg launched Detect in partnership with consumer electronics veteran and now Detect CEO Hugo Barra at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic with the goal of bringing pathogen testing into the home. Elana sees the potential there too. Isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus, he wrote. display: block; The Butterfly iQ is the first hand-held, ultrasound scanner for under $2,000, substantially lower than other handheld scanners and a far cry from the cost of traditional ultrasound medical imaging technology, which can range anywhere from $20,000 up. Detect is one of seven companies founded by Jonathan Rothberg, a scientist, entrepreneur and New Haven native who earned his his Ph.D. at Yale and spearheads the startup accelerator 4Catalyzer. "I've. [7], In 2014, Rothberg founded Hyperfine to develop the world's first portable MRI scanner[21] that can be transported easily between patients and costs a fraction of traditional MRI. Rothberg founded Quantum-Si in 2013 with the mission of transforming single molecule analysis and democratizing its use by providing researchers and clinicians access to the proteome, the set of proteins expressed within a cell. The customer reception[26] and press coverage[27] of the product has been overwhelmingly positive. The promise of a self-administered test in a single tube was irresistibly seductive. height: 5px; Jonathan Marc Rothberg - National Science and Technology Medals Foundation [29] The TSC project was based on technology known as the Drug Design and Optimization Lab (D2OL), which the institute sponsored through 2009, to use volunteers' personal computers to model interactions of drug candidates with their target molecules. The test tubes had to be shaken vigorously and then flickedwords that were not entirely self-explanatorybefore being placed in the heater. There are currently limits. For instance, in 2017 while the yacht was in . I disobeyed the doctor and drove our son to the Bronx. Prior to Xiaomi, Hugo was the Vice President for Android product management at Google, where he led the product team in developing the Android operating system, developer ecosystem and hardware alliances. ". had granted approval to a saliva-based test developed at Yale, and Rothberg fielded half a dozen phone calls from friends who had the impression that the testing nightmare, and in turn the pandemic itself, was effectively over. [34] Rothberg made Fortune Magazine's 2001 list of the 40 richest Americans under 40. Led by Founder Dr. Jonathan Rothberg, the Detect team is redesigning the future of healthcare with the power of technology. While quarantining aboard his yacht, Rothberg has devoted himself to developing a diagnostic that is as fast, simple, and inexpensive as a home pregnancy test. Theyre important to the ecosystem and theyre literally in the seawater that we swim in and play in.. In times of distress, Rothberg soothes himself with engineering problems, and as he sat in the waiting room he fixated on the fact that there was no expeditious way to determine whether the babys condition was genetic. Not, however, Gene Machine yacht owner Jonathan Rothberg. But, even if the U.S. government had acted with alacrity and competence, there are limits to what such a system can do. With $100 Million, Entrepreneur Sees Path to Disrupt Medical Imaging He taught himself to write code on an early Texas Instruments minicomputer, then sold an inventory-management program to a local tire shop, but wasnt trusted with the house keys. It wasn't until early August that his test gave a positive result in the wild: a replacement chef was prevented from coming onboard before he could expose everyone. 454 Life Sciences and the Baylor College of Medicine Genome Center were the first to complete and make public the sequence of an individual human genome (James D. Watson[9][10]). He Did It | Carnegie Mellon Today BCBSA recognizes that breakthrough technologies, such as this virtual reality tool for addressing addiction,can make healthcare more accessible, more affordableand ultimately improve lives and prioritizes shininga light on the kind of technologies that can begame changers. Her dad, who planned and funded the lab, peeked inside some days to observe her and Wang prepare their samples for DNA sequencing, which will take place back in Connecticut. I wanted to do all of that with a $2,000 device. But if Homodeus wanted to sell their kits into the large and lucrative university market, his team had very little time to get everything in order. had come around to this way of thinking. For use by qualified and trained healthcare practitioners. Rothberg is now back working at a land-based lab in his hometown of Guilford, Connecticut. When he thinks about the genetic information hiding inside the worlds waters, he sees opportunities to craft new medicines and treatments. He fell in love with them. But we have to have something at home. In so much time, we couldnt get anything done as a nation. These can be quick and inexpensive but arent generally as accurate as molecular tests, which indicate not the presence of a viral proxy, like a protein, but of the virus itself. We have a drug that may stop the entry of the virus into the heart, The number-one drug was our LAM002 [in the Gates Foundation-funded study], Rothberg said. in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.S., M.Phil, and Ph.D. in biology from Yale University. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. All supplies coming on board were cleaned, and anyone entering the ship had to isolate and test for COVID-19. He is best known for inventing and commercializing massively parallel DNA sequencing, which earned him a National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Obama, the nation's highest honor for technological achievement. Thinking big is Rothbergs style. Jonathan Rothberg is the founder of Butterfly and has served as the Chairman of New Butterflys board of directors since February 2021. [2] Interested in wine-making, he acquired Chamard Vineyards in nearby Clinton, CT.[2] Rothberg owns a yacht called Gene Machine, which is equipped with a lab on board, [6] and its support vessel, Gene Chaser. He then went on to earn an MS, MPhil, and PhD in biology from Yale University. It was a promising advance, but Rothberg wanted to go further: to contain the entire mechanism in a single vial. That same daughter, now grown, uses the lab for her own scientific research. We have a drug that may stop the entry of the virus into the heart, Rothberg said, adding that this has been shown, not confirmed.. In the wake of the dot-com bust, CuraGens stock price fell precipitously. With the exception of the heater, which Rothberg planned to do away with eventually, the design made good on everything he considered crucial. The family got its boat back, and Rothberg got a new lab. June 17, 2021 . (Their sensitivity, or rate of false negatives, is less certain.) Dr. Some of the dorm rooms had been set aside as isolation units; if the task force could instantly sequester an infectious student, they felt they stood a good chance of making it to November. The line was hours long in sweltering sidewalk heat, and we were told that the center would almost certainly hit their daily capacity of a hundred and twenty-eight tests before we were called. There are very few visionary scientists who also can be successful entrepreneurs, Forman wrote in an email. His close friend and first business partner, Greg Went, ferried him back to Connecticut for vacations. Rothbergs predictions were almost immediately confirmed: a small Massachusetts startup, E25Bio, soon announced that they had raised millions of dollars of venture capital, and anticipated approval for their fifteen-minute at-home antigen test within two months. I'm gratified that answering that question allowed me to take a journey with the most creative scientists, engineers, and physicians, and ultimately to help others.". font: 700 23px/25px Belizio,Georgia,Droid Serif,serif; For the time being, the university would be relying on a testing program set up by the Broad Institute, in Cambridge, to support institutions in the area. Elanas youngest sibling, 7-year-old Jacob, collected one of the water samples by dipping his arm into the murky water of a 17th century Amsterdam canal to fill a plastic bottle. Hugo holds two bachelor's degrees and a master's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Photograph by Jiajun Wang for The New Yorker, We should look to students to conceive of appropriate, Trump is helping tycoons who have donated to his relection campaign, The coronavirus is likely to reshape architecture. There would never be such a thing as the COVID test. Remember those late-night infomercials for a knife that could do anythingthe guy cuts down a tree with it outside and then goes to work in his kitchen? he said. Sign in to stop seeing this, Sara Netanyahu accosted by protesters at Tel Aviv hair salon, extricated by police, Brides joy turns to sorrow after Elan Ganeles killed driving to her wedding, Hiker discovers 2,500-year-old ancient receipt from reign of Purim kings father, Netanyahu compares Tel Aviv protesters to settlers who set fire to Huwara. As it was, he immediately began to write patents. If so, please join The Times of Israel Community. Rothberg has come, over time, to recognize his own administrative shortcomings, and for the COVID-19 project he hired some proven mercenaries for help. [30], Rothberg sponsors the Rothberg Catalyzer Prize at four universities: Carnegie Mellon University, Yale University, Brown University, and University of Pennsylvania. In 2011, Rothberg founded Butterfly Network after seeing a talk by MIT physicist Max Tegmark, who was becoming fascinated by artificial intelligence. Though he had confidence in his prototypes, he stipulated that I get tested before I arrived. The project took four months and about a million dollars. Guilford Biotech Pioneer Charting New Territory In His Superyacht's Lab The flood of cash represents a victory swashbuckling biotech entrepreneur Jonathan Rothberg who aims to change medical imaging with his $2,000 device. He is the first person to be named a World Economic Forum's Technology Pioneer four separate times, is an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year and . This method could bring the cost of each test down to perhaps three or four dollars. "Jonathan M. Rothberg wants to do for DNA sequencing what Steve Jobs did for computing spread it to the masses. Prior to that, Hugo was the Vice President of Global for Xiaomi, where he was responsible for the expansion of consumer electronics into 20 markets across 3 continents. Fortunately, the ship had been outfitted with Rothbergs demiurgic propensities in mind. [22] Hyperfine received FDA clearance in 2021 to add deep-learning algorithms to boost the quality of images. Dr. Rothberg was born in 1963 in New Haven, Connecticut. Butterfly developed the device by boiling down the complex mechanics behind ultrasound onto a computer chip. Were working with the FDA and other agencies to allow us to allow people to scan themselves, Rothberg said. All of our institutional inventory has gone to hospitals. [15] He founded the company with an undisclosed amount of his own money and later took in $23 million in venture capital. Whenever his wife was able to be home from the hospital for dinner, the children passed their mothers face in two dimensions around the table. The companys board, which saw Rothbergs high-speed-sequencing side hustle as more of a distraction than a valuable investment, fired him in 2005; 454 Life Sciences was sold off for a hundred and fifty-five million dollars, which Rothberg believed represented about a fifth of the subsidiarys actual value. He earned a B.S. Rothberg told his eldest son, a Yale junior studying abroad in London, to pack his bags and head directly for Heathrow; the young man flew through Miami, picking up one of his cousins in transit, and joined his father and siblings on the Gene Machine. Jonathan Rothberg is the founder of Butterfly and has served as the Chairman of New Butterfly's board of directors since February 2021. Data-driven insights to improve the health of all Americans. On March 9th, he convened, via Zoom, a handful of people, drawn from Homodeus and its kin companies, and told them he thought they could produce a device, secure the Food and Drug Administrations go-ahead, and ramp up to mass production in only three months. ", "Giving everyone a window into the human body., "Rothberg's machine is the first attempt to lower the cost of DNA sequencing machines to bring them to a far wider audience. Theyre also found everywhere there are an estimated 100 quadrillion individual bacterial microorganisms on Earth, a dizzying figure known as a nonillion. Rothberg thought the teams background work in custom enzyme production was well suited to the contrivance of a COVID-19 diagnostic that did not rely on cumbersome and expensive machines. I was going to give it to him anyway, she joked. Butterfly iQ is portable and works anywhere in the world with a cell phone. It occurred to Rothberg, in his unplanned retirement, that he could put the entire process on a silicon chip and bring the price down by an order of magnitude. [3] Noah turned out to be fine, but Rothberg was frustrated that doctors did not have a rapid test to ensure his son did not have an inherited disease. He is the founder of multiple health technology companies, including CuraGen, 454 Life Sciences, Ion Torrent, and more recently Butterfly Network (the worlds most accessible and fastest-selling ultrasound device), Quantum-Si (the first single-molecule protein sequencing platform), and Hyperfine (the worlds first truly portable MRI machine). My test failed to register a conclusive result. breakthrough technologies, such as this virtual reality tool for addressing addiction. After a study by the Gates Foundation showed that swabs should be flocked, or tipped with tiny bristles, rather than spun on the model of a Q-tip, Rothbergs supply-chain managerswho were, as often as not, also his engineersimmediately began to negotiate with a Taiwanese vender to produce small flocked versions for their exclusive use. Absent a national plan, private institutions had been left to fend for themselves. Jonathan Rothberg and 10 West San Marino Drive in Miami Beach (Photos via Getty, Venetian Islands Waterfront) A trust linked to a biotech .