Rothberg bought a boat, he told me, as night fell on the marsh and the black water below was lit with the bright neon of the Gene Machine logo, and installed a high-backed throne on the bow of the sundecka reminder, he says, that things tend to work out in the end. He brought an empty bottle, which he filled with water from a swamp. His father, Henry Rothberg, had made a small fortune with the invention of a breakthrough form of adhesive for the installation of ceramic tile and stone. [7] CuraGen went public in 1999. The superyachts captain, Matt Gow, had been on board for the entirety of the pandemic to date, and, unfamiliar with the radical revision of landed customs, extended his hand in greeting. Putting the work space on the familys boat instead of at 4Catalyzer in Guilford meant Elana could come along on the familys vacation and still conduct research. [34] Rothberg made Fortune Magazine's 2001 list of the 40 richest Americans under 40. background-color: #c52026; Jonathan Rothberg and 10 West San Marino Drive in Miami Beach (Photos via Getty, Venetian Islands Waterfront) A trust linked to a biotech . Other universitiesU.N.C. We are motivated by the idea that our products will improve the lives of people we love, and hope to create a healthier world, with the help of everyone in it. There was, however, good-faith disagreement among experts about how to proceed. Butterfly has had a very successful training program.. See also our Career page. In February, Rothberg had been dumbstruck by the U.S. governments failure to marshal its resources in preparation for a comprehensive clinical-testing regime. Dr. Rothberg is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, is a trustee of Carnegie Mellon University and an Adjunct Professor of Genetics at Yale University. Together with his wife Bonnie, they created the Rothberg Institute for Childhood Diseases. The team had recently got very promising preclinical results: their tests sensitivity put them well within striking distance of the PCR standard. A fusion of semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and cloud technology has made it possible to create a ubiquitous imaging solution that is clinically significant and category defining. But we have to have something at home. To date, scanners have been donated to medical charities working in 13 low income countries, including seven in Africa. Maybe the answer to global warming is in the bacteria phages in the water.. Rothberg is a high-energy biotech entrepreneur who has been trapped in quarantine on his super-yacht, the Gene Machine, since mid-March, when we first reached him . As a chemical engineer, biologist, and professor of genetics at Yale University, Rothberg's response to his daughter's diagnosis and the lack of satisfactory medical solutions was to search for a cure himself. Identifeye Health (formerly Tesseract Health) was founded in 2018 to build technology at the nexus of radiology and laboratory medicine on the diagnostic tree. 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. Although Rothberg had designed his kit for home diagnosis, he had been told early on that he should first pursue F.D.A. 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. Once an image is captured, it can be sent via secure connection to medical professionals anywhere in the world. He is testing his employees and their families, using not only Detect but also a separate reverse-transcription qualitative PCR test or RT-qPCR test. The two-thousand-dollar machine that processed Quidels thirty-dollar antigen test kits was backordered for the foreseeable future; it was being used for parties in the Hamptons and by concierge medical services. Rothberg, who received his Ph.D. in molecular biology from Yale in 1991, is founder of a string of successful Connecticut companies, including 454 Life Science, CuraGen, Ion Torrent, Raindance Technologies, Hyperfine Research, Butterfly Network Inc., LAM Therapeutics, and 4Catalyzer. In 1999, Rothberg and Gould had a son, who turned blue after birth and was rushed to the NICU. AI Therapeutics - Deep Learning Precision Medicine jonathan rothberg daughterthe renaissance apartments chicago. I guess thats how I think, too, about this project. 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]). Rothberg felt compelled to help with the pandemic response. for their twenty-five-minute rapid point-of-care test. Still, Illuminas sequencing machines were large and unwieldythey often required special fortified floors for supportand sold for half a million dollars. Offer applies to new customers only. One luxury broker and charter operator told me that Rothberg is venerated, in the small, gossipy world of superyacht owners, as the mad scientist with his state-of-the-art lab. The broker continued, Its well known in the industry that Rothberg does his best thinking on the ship, where his mind is clear and free of distractions.. Other countries rose to the occasion, and were able to use widespread PCR testing to track and manage their outbreaks. American scientist and entrepreneur (born 1963), National Medal of Technology and Innovation, "Laurencin and Rothberg Receive White House Honors", "Rothberg Seeks to Make DNA Sequencing Common", "On board with Jonathan Rothberg, owner of 55m explorer yacht Gene Machine", "Quantum-Si taps founder Rothberg, prolific medtech entrepreneur, as interim CEO", "Curagen Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2000", Project Jim: Watsons Personal Genome Goes Public, "Roche to close 454 Life Sciences as it reduces gene sequencing focus", "RainDance Technologies To Be Sold to Bio-Rad", "Guilford incubator 4Catalyzer aims for game-changing medical products", "An Entrepreneur Aims To Peer Inside The Body With A Small, Simple, Cheap Device", "Aiming To Revolutionize Medical Ultrasound, Butterfly Raises $250 Million At A $1.25 Billion Valuation", "Investor Relations - Quantum-Si Incorporated", "Quantum-Si closes USD1bn+ SPAC deal with HighCape", "A serial entrepreneur wants his portable MRI to transform medicine", "Hyperfine's portable MRI nets FDA clearance for deep-learning-powered imaging", "Hyperfine Announces Receipt of Additional $3.3 Million Grant to Improve Access to Neonatal and Pediatric Brain Imaging in Low-Resource Settings Globally", "Hyperfine, Liminal to go public in $580M SPAC deal", "Detect Combines Lab-Quality Covid Testing with At-Home Convenience", "Detect CEO Hugo Barra on how its Covid test differs from a rapid antigen test", "On April 15, 2009, the D2OL distributed computing project will officially end operations", "Alumnus Rothberg enlists students to solve next healthcare challenges", "Graduate School Honors Four Alumni with Wilbur Cross Medals | Yale Graduate School of Arts & Sciences", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jonathan_Rothberg&oldid=1142428350, Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering alumni, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with unsourced statements from March 2023, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 2 March 2023, at 09:20. Auto Bladder Volume tool is only available for iOS devices. Jonathan Rothberg Buys Venetian Islands Home For $24M - The Real Deal 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. On March 6, Bonnie was called back to her job as a physician at a New Haven hospital to work the night shift. 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. 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. Please update your browser or switch to Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus, he wrote. Rothbergs original plan for 2020 had been to use one of his newer companies, Homodeus, to trawl for genetic evidence of panspermia, the not entirely disreputable idea that life on earth arrived in the form of ancient space dust. The ocean is a mysterious place, says Elana, now 17 and a rising senior at Choate-Rosemary Hall. The fact that his yacht is named GENE MACHINE provides a clue about the direction of both his science and his business. Rothberg knows the glory that scientific discovery can bring. All of his companies are all about helping the people he loves, she says. The sequencing itself will take place at 4Catalyzer, the company Jonathan Rothberg founded in 2014 to accelerate medical breakthroughs. 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. 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. Dr. Rothberg went on to invent semiconductor chip-based sequencing, and sequenced Gordon Moore (Moores law) as the first individual to be sequenced on a semiconductor chip (Nature). Just that morning, hed been upset to hear that Purdue University, in Indiana, had suspended thirty-six students for attending a party. Dr. Jonathan Rothberg is best known for inventing high-speed, Next-Gen DNA sequencing. The rollout of such a testing regime, according to Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard and a co-author of the study, can effectively be akin to a vaccine that was introduced tomorrow. For this reason, many epidemiologists and public-health experts have pushed the F.D.A. In so much time, we couldnt get anything done as a nation. [2] As a child Jonathan went on sales calls with his father. .galleries:before { Each company also has a connection to his actual family. Jonathan is that rare person who can do both, with aplomb. . [22] Hyperfine received FDA clearance in 2021 to add deep-learning algorithms to boost the quality of images. She wanted to know what genes, chromosomes and proteins the building blocks of precision medicine could be hidden in this sea that seemed so crisp and bottomless and empty. At 454 Life Sciences, we built the first high-throughput next-gen genome sequencer and invented the core technologies behind all of next-gen sequencing: cloning by limiting dilution and sequencing by synthesis on a single substrate.At Ion Torrent, we invented sequencing on a semiconductor chip. NOW machine, represented a whole new ballgame. Almost twelve weeks into the New York metropolitan areas lockdown, however, the machine, which costs thousands of dollars, remained a scarce commodity. 2023 Cond Nast. The Gene Machine was moored at a distance from the other resting vessels, on the perimeter of a basin adjacent to the marinas active shipyard, where rusty fishing charters and stocky catamarans hung suspended in drydock. The Homodeus team had been invited to the campus of Roger Williams University, which cleaves to a peninsular hillside in Bristol, Rhode Island, to conduct a pilot. Over the past six weeks, hed left the boat only for short tours of the estuary, and for afternoon pedal-boarding for exercise in the tidal marshes. He earned a B.S. Rothberg himself was more cautious, ushering me up to the breezy expanse of the sundeck, where we took our places opposite each other on long weatherproof settees and he gave drink orders to a uniformed crewmember wearing an unobtrusive headset. I cruise into a new place, he said, and think about how glad I was that I was fired., Rothbergs biotech incubator, 4Catalyzer, originally encompassed four startups; last year, he added three more, including Homodeus. Liminal enables critical brain vital signs to make brain monitoring as ubiquitous as heart monitoring. 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. What makes the Butterfly iQ scanner different from existing ultrasound machines is the way Rothbergs team has simplified the operating system. The F.D.A. Rothberg married Gould, a graduate of Yale's medical and public-health programs, in 1995; in 1996, their first child, a daughter, was born with a condition that can cause seizures. For as little as $6 a month you can help support our quality journalism while enjoying The Times of Israel AD-FREE, as well as accessing exclusive content available only to Times of Israel Community members. Thinking big is Rothbergs style. I had a need because she was driving up to Boston to have ultrasound exams. Rothberg told The Times of Israel that the immunosuppressive drug his daughter takes is the result of an initiative that he and his wife sponsored 15 years ago in an attempt to help her. Rothberg lives and works in Connecticut, where his holdings include a biotech incubator, a vineyard, and a full-scale near-replica of Stonehenge, made of Norwegian granite and modified for celestial alignment with his childrens birthdays, but for the moment he was at sea. In molecular biology the last 20 years, weve had more and more complex tests, more and more complex data, Rothberg said at the conference. Six months after its theatrical dbut, Ion Torrent was sold to Life Technologies for a total of about seven hundred and twenty-five million dollars. You can read this a hundred times, but its a personal lesson in how insidious this thing is. Rothberg put the chef up in a motel for two weeks. Silicon Valley arrives in Guilford as inventor unveils at-home and "Jonathan M. Rothberg wants to do for DNA sequencing what Steve Jobs did for computing spread it to the masses. They repeated the test with the same result, and Rothberg called in a favor with a friend and collaborator at Yale to line up an immediate PCR test, which confirmed the infection. His daughter suffers from a disease . 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. Tests arent going to be like that, and were going to need antibody and antigen tests for population-level control. Abbott said that the findings were not consistent with other studies, and the White House continued to rely on them.) Our Chief Executive Officer Hugo Barra brings more than 20 years of executive experience in consumer technology to Detect with the goal of transforming consumer healthcare diagnostics into a new consumer product category. Such molecular tests can be calibrated for an unimprovable specificity: false positives are exceedingly rare. 4. Early life [ edit] Rothberg was born in New Haven, Connecticut, to Lillian Rothberg and Henry Rothberg, a chemical engineer. Winning the award for healthcare innovation. for their antigen test in April, had not yet achieved regulatory approvalthere was no shortage of entrants to the field. .galleries:after { But it still wasnt clear whether there was any practical way to test entire populations frequently enough to keep campuses, workplaces, and other congregate bodies open. Seller purchased the spec home for $20.4M in November. 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. Platforms get smarter as customers use them. Interview with GENE MACHINE's owner Dr. Jonathan Rothberg and his The New England Journal described Dr. Rothbergs innovation as "The New Age of Molecular Diagnostics", Science magazine called it one of the top 10 breakthroughs for 2008. But it would require a major investment in infrastructure and personnel. Rothberg has come, over time, to recognize his own administrative shortcomings, and for the COVID-19 project he hired some proven mercenaries for help. Using the drug LAM002, or apilimod, AI Therapeutics obtained hopeful results, which Rothberg says are backed up by an independent Harvard lab and a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded study of 12,000 drugs and compounds. If [a clinical trial is] shown to be effective, and we get emergency use authorization, thats exciting, Rothberg said. A molecular biophysics and biochemistry major, Wang studies proteins and their importance in designing drugs. There were likely more economical solutions: Roger Williams could, for example, buy home-brew LAMP kits from New England Biolabs and set up its own lab on the Racine, Wisconsin, model. Email. Together with his wife Bonnie, they created the Rothberg Institute for Childhood Diseases. Published in Nature magazine, that genome was made publicly on GenBank and browsable via the efforts of Lincoln Stein's group contributing to personal genomics. Dr. Rothberg is an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year, is the recipient of The Wall Street Journals First Gold Medal for Innovation, SXSW Best in Show, Nature Methods First Method of the Year Award, the Connecticut Medal of Technology, the DGKL Biochemical Analysis Prize, and an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Mount Sinai. There are very few visionary scientists who also can be successful entrepreneurs, Forman wrote in an email. It was clear to many scientists, Rothberg among them, that the best bet for a cut-rate but exacting diagnostic technology was loop-mediated isothermal nucleic acid amplification (LAMP), which was patented by a Japanese pharmaceutical company twenty years ago, and has primarily been used to meet diagnostic needs in low-resource places, for tropical diseases like Zika and dengue fever. Rothberg, despite his general chutzpah, acknowledged that different people in different communities at different times and in different places will have different needs. His siblings could retire if they wanted to. "Jonathan is a pioneer in the development of radical new technologies that marry engineering and the life sciences, and has been highly successful in bringing these novel technologies into wide commercial use, said Richard Lifton, Sterling Professor and chair of the Department of Genetics at Yale. 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 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 received The Wall Street Journal's First Gold Medal for Innovation. Deans Advisory Council on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Affairs Website, Minority Organization for Retention and Expansion Website, Committee on the Status of Women in Medicine Website, Director of Scientist Diversity and Inclusion, Diversity, Inclusion, Community Engagement, and Equity Website, Yale BBS Diversity & Inclusion Collective, Physician-Scientist & Scientist Development, Yale Physician-Scientist Development Awards, Yale International Physician-Scientist Resident and Fellow Research Award, Program for the Promotion of Interdisciplinary Team Science (POINTS), Connecticut Towns COVID-19 Impact Dashboard, CT Correctional Facilities with COVID Cases Dashboard, US Racial and Ethnic Disparities in COVID-19 Mortality, Risk of Complications Conditional on COVID-19 Infection, Travel Time to COVID Testing Sites in Connecticut, Travel Time to COVID Testing Sites in the US, Peer-Reviewed Publications by Yale Authors, Submitted by John Curtis on December 23, 2015, https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17621/internet-explorer-downloads. 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.". Dr. Jonathan Rothberg is the founder of multiple life science and medical device companies including Butterfly Network, Hyperfine and the 4Catalyzer incubator. Hes proud that his portable MRI is being offered to 40 low-resource countries that never had telemedicine before. By the end of the first day, hed received an e-mail from a great manufacturer. On day two, he reported that hed made some general progress on the sample collection. He asked his followers, in a poll, whether they thought he should continue, and, for reasons that were not fully clear, he tagged the Gates Foundation. Faster PCR would be a tremendous help, but, so many months into the pandemic, any fantasy of national orchestration had been vacated, and by late July an alternative consensus had emerged in favor of widespread, frequent rapid testing. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association is an association of independent, locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield Companies. Homodeus was not allowed to market their test until they had received an E.U.A., but they could nonetheless enter into preliminary discussions with interested parties. On land and sea, US presidential-honored scientist works toward home His initiatives include not only the Detect coronavirus test but also the Butterfly iQ, an ultra-portable, whole-body ultrasound that he describes as the top-selling in the world; a groundbreaking portable MRI; and a drug called LAM002 that he says shows promise against COVID-19. The Detect test differs from the antibody and antigen versions being developed by other companies. (Their sensitivity, or rate of false negatives, is less certain.) In the US, on an ultrasound, you cant scan yourself, you need a health care professional to guide you remotely, Rothberg said, although self-scans are allowed in other countries, including Italy. At Butterfly Network, we have built the world's first ultrasound-on-a-chip that's FDA cleared for 13 indications, priced at under $2000.Every healthcare provider now has access to an intuitive, powerful, whole-body medical imaging system that fits in their pocket. His optimism was abiding: his test, with its single vial, would work as advertised. Consulting is as easy as sending a text message, and the tech is accessible, in your pocket, 24 hours a day, says Rothberg. The Butterfly iQ ultrasound, developed by Rothbergs startup the Butterfly Network, is seen as a way for individuals to treat themselves at home, including for COVID lung. Some system would be required to link the students to their respective kits as they arrived, presumably after standing in an orderly line while observing social-distancing measures. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. [11] Rothberg lost control of 454 Life Sciences by 2007. Most are undiscovered. Come on. (This week, President Trump announced a seven-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar deal to buy a hundred and fifty million rapid antigen tests from Abbott Laboratoriesintended, however, only for those who have shown symptoms.). 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. Data-driven insights to improve the health of all Americans. I had known from my work at Ion Torrent that if you can leverage Moore's law . But, when signs indicate that the virus is under control, it could get people out of their homes and moving again. He was sanguine enough about his test that he used the prototypes more than eleven hundred times on his boat in eleven weeks: his family and the crew were screened every day, and he sent drones to shore to ferry samples from prospective visitors. By Alex Philippidis. Teleguidance only available for iOS devices. Rothberg was committed to the development of a molecular nucleic-acid test as accurate as PCR, as fast and simple as a home pregnancy test, and as inexpensive as an antibody or antigen option. For financing, he brought in Emil Michael, best known for his role as the money man at Uber, and as C.E.O. This summer, they launched the research project by collecting samples from 32 bodies of water across the world. The schools events team had installed Plexiglas-protected card tables in the field houses cavernous gymnasium for sample collection; the effect was of a polling station in an unusually paranoid electoral district. If so, please join The Times of Israel Community. Sponsored by the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA), Not Impossibles Healthcare Breakthrough Award category recognizes innovations in healthcare. On June 1st, 2019, Rothberg, along with Butterfly Network co-founder Nevada Sanchez and Design Lead, Gioel Molinari, were honored at the Not Impossible Awards, held in Los Angeles. GUILFORD, Conn. Guilford based, a world-renowned scientist and engineer, Jonathan Rothberg, spent his quarantine developing an at-home Covid test kit in the lab aboard his superyacht. [19] In 2021 Quantum-Si went public on the NASDAQ under the ticker $QSI. A streamlined operation might be able to complete thousands of tests at once, but trucks can only carry so many samples and move so quickly, and the turnaround time for a result is almost never less than a day.