Dr. On land and sea, US presidential-honored scientist works toward home Hed assumed that the people in charge would get their act together before long, but he swore to himself that he would face the next pandemic with a simple diagnostic platform of his own devising. Elana Rothberg and Wang will use that same device to sequence the sea, using the DNA of waterborne bacteria and the viruses that inhabit them, called bacteriophages. In 2010, Ion Torrent was acquired by Life Technologies for $725 million, the largest acquisition of its kind. Jonathan Rothberg wanted to know. New York and New Jersey had the nations highest confirmed caseloads at the time, but the dozens of testing sites I called advertised a three-to-five-day wait for resultsif, that is, they accepted asymptomatic customers at all. Wang, who interned with 4Catalyzer before this summer, grew up with a window into medicine and health care, as his parents work at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston his dad as a medical imaging specialist and his mom as a computer scientist and database administrator. Of primary importance was the apparently semantic difference between whether someone was infected versus whether they were infectious. A PCR test can register the presence of an infection at such a vanishingly low limit of detectionthe threshold at which a given test can reliably identify the presence of the virusthat it could return a positive result even before an individual is likely infectious. Specifications. Platforms get smarter as customers use them. Not available in Canada. His product would not only do away with the machines required by his competitors antigen tests, it would approximate the diagnostic rigor of the PCR standard. By Alex Philippidis. in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.S., M.Phil, and Ph.D. in biology from Yale University. After six weeks in the Caribbean and Florida, the Gene Machine began to head north, taking up a berth at a marina in Savannah, Georgia, where Rothberg could more easily receive deliveries of the tools and matriel3-D printers, for example, that worked with biocompatible resinshe required for prototyping. If [a clinical trial is] shown to be effective, and we get emergency use authorization, thats exciting, Rothberg said. Liminal enables critical brain vital signs to make brain monitoring as ubiquitous as heart monitoring. Rothberg, a biotechnology pioneer, received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Barack Obama in 2016. 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. Nine months ago, Rothberg a Yale PhD whose precedent-setting achievements were honored by the Obama administration in 2016 was on vacation with his wife, Bonnie Gould Rothberg, and their five children, aboard the familys superyacht, the Gene Machine. Registering also lets you comment on articles and helps us improve your experience. Rothberg says he got interested in ultrasound technology because his oldest daughter, now a college student, has tuberous sclerosis. We want to make fast, accurate diagnostic testing as routine as taking your temperature and as accessible as telemedicine. **Lifetime Pro membership applies to iQ+ only and cannot be transferred to other devices. For the Butterfly iQ, my daughter went up to Boston to do a kind of scan with specialized equipment that would do a volumetric ultrasound. I had been around Rothbergs children, and the moment was tense. When the roommate tested positive, he isolated from Rothbergs son and their other roommate which, according to Rothberg, prevented them from becoming exposed. 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. 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. Please update your browser or switch to Chrome, Firefox or Safari. [1] He works and resides in Guilford, Connecticut. But, to the chagrin of some experts, the agency continues to recommend against rapid testing for asymptomatic individuals. He stepped Inside the ICE House to lay out his mission to make healthcare accessible to everyone, beginning with the journey that . Jonathan Rothberg Buys Venetian Islands Home For $24M - The Real Deal Jonathan Rothberg, PhD < Yale School of Medicine Jonathan Rothberg and 10 West San Marino Drive in Miami Beach (Photos via Getty, Venetian Islands Waterfront) A trust linked to a biotech . breakthrough technologies, such as this virtual reality tool for addressing addiction. But it would require a major investment in infrastructure and personnel. But when Elana is looking for inspiration, she also thinks of her summers on the Gene Machine, and the way the world shes seen so much of is changing. He remembers being honored by Obama, who made the day memorable not only for Rothberg, but also his family. Ive lived my entire life this way, he said. content: ; [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. He had promised his youngest child, a nine-year-old, that they could spend the odd hours of the summer constructing a small hoverboard, and among the boxes disinfected and carted aboard each day were sets of ducted fans and microcontrollers. A four-part strategy of hygiene, distancing, screening, and masks will not return us to normal life. Incorrect password. At a large biotech conference in February of 2010, during a keynote, he had his largest employee walk in from the back carrying in his arms a machine the size of a desktop printer. Then, once the test tubes had been withdrawn from the heater, returned to their original chimneys, and broken open to saturate the readout strip, their results had to be interpreted in no fewer than five minutes and no more than tenany shorter and the lines might not yet have appeared, any longer and the results were no longer valid. By July, it seemed as though the F.D.A. }, Guilford Biotech Pioneer Charting New Territory, Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Welcome to the new courant.com: Whats changed, FAQs and more, Guilford Biotech Pioneer Charting New Territory In His Superyachts Lab, CT man found guilty of narcotics, firearm offenses, Hartford Civilian Police Review Board inspector general resigns, With old Ames HQ in Rocky Hill demolished, state kicks in nearly $1 million for multi-use development, Parkinsons symptoms eased by non-surgical procedure, study shows, Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information. Rothbergs best thinking generates new ideas at a berserk pace, often without regard for immediate feasibility, but his ambitions are warranted by a long history of unlikely successes. Rothberg was known, however, for his intransigence in the face of technical challenges. (Courtesy), Then-president Barack Obama shakes hands with Dr. Jonathan Rothberg, of the 4catalyzer Corporation and Yale School of Medicine after awarding him the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, Thursday, May 19, 2016, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington. Though some of Rothbergs earliest competitors had been held upE25Bio, the Massachusetts company that expected an E.U.A. I disobeyed the doctor and drove our son to the Bronx. Elana, then 16, was thinking about DNA. (The word itself is derived from the forty days of isolation imposed by the Venetian authorities on incoming ships.) With 454s technology, Dr. Rothberg sequenced the first individual human genome, and with Svante Paabo he initiated the first large-scale effort to sequence ancient DNA (The Neanderthal Genome Project). 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. 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). He earned a B.S. It gave us additional supporting evidence.. 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. Dr. Rothberg received his Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.S. He founded 454 Life Sciences, bringing to market the first new method for sequencing genomes since Sanger and Gilbert won the Nobel Prize in 1980. He tagged researchers at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. But Elana and the intern, Yale student Stephen Wang, are energized about the possibilities. I stopped as little as possible on the thirteen-hour drive to Savannah, but it was difficult to miss the abrupt shift in rest-stop mask prevalence in the stretch between Richmond, Virginia, and Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Names and data used in examples on product screens are fictitious unless otherwise noted. Dr. Rothberg was born in 1963 in New Haven, Connecticut. Rothberg, a biotechnology pioneer, received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Barack Obama in 2016. Jonathan Rothberg - Wikipedia Rothberg came over to look into the problem, but Bean was already on his way downstairs to retrieve a set of replacement components that had been printed on the boat. Tests arent going to be like that, and were going to need antibody and antigen tests for population-level control. Rothberg wanted to abbreviate all of this commotion. Rothberg told his core staff not to worry about competitorshe expected that most of them would be focussed on antibody tests, which can only diagnose in retrospect and have often proved untrustworthy, or antigen tests, which register the presence of viral proteins. In so much time, we couldnt get anything done as a nation. Their hope was that by late autumn their supply chains, which included around a dozen venders, most of them domestic, could be producing millions of units per month. 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. When COVID-19 first struck, he was working on several endeavors while on vacation a search for enzymes that would break down plastics in the ocean; and a quest for evidence of the theory of panspermia, which posits that life on Earth is descended from interstellar dust. [17] Rothberg brought in one of Tegmark's smartest students, Nevada Sanchez, a co-founder of the company who was named among Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2015. Outline: #Nasal_swab (Q-tip) w/ freeze dried reagents for isothermal #DNA amplification with #COVID19 primers. Individuals interested in listening to . 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 was born in Connecticut, the second-youngest of seven siblings. 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. Detect About Us They would collect their own samples under supervision, but would they manage the next steps on their own? ", Professor (Adjunct) of Research of Genetics. Moreover, the enzymes they needed were made by only about ten suitable venders in the world, and if a small company could even place an order the quotes came in high. 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. His optimism was abiding: his test, with its single vial, would work as advertised. I had a need because she was driving up to Boston to have ultrasound exams. Jonathan Rothberg Net Worth. How to test everyone for the coronavirus | MIT Technology Review In 1999,. [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. Thats the same tactic Rothberg used years earlier when he invented a device to carry out modern, high-speed DNA sequencing at his former company Ion Torrent, which sold for $725 million in 2010. 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. In February, Rothberg had been dumbstruck by the U.S. governments failure to marshal its resources in preparation for a comprehensive clinical-testing regime. Theyre also found everywhere there are an estimated 100 quadrillion individual bacterial microorganisms on Earth, a dizzying figure known as a nonillion. (Courtesy). It was a promising advance, but Rothberg wanted to go further: to contain the entire mechanism in a single vial. Meanwhile, Rothberg is monitoring his other coronavirus-related ventures. Jonathan Rothberg Net Worth 2023, Age, Height, Relationships, Married, Dating, Family, Wiki Biography. On board with Jonathan Rothberg, owner of 55m explorer yacht Gene Machine 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 . From his invention of revolutionary DNA sequencing technologies to hand-held medical imaging devices, his highly innovative contributions have had enormous impact. Rothberg felt compelled to help with the pandemic response. [31], Rothberg had his own version of Stonehenge, which he calls the Circle of Life, built near his home in Guilford, CT, using 700 tons of granite imported from Norway. Elana, too nervous to touch the dirty water, says she bribed him with a lollipop. Thank you, David Horovitz, Founding Editor of The Times of Israel, 2023 The Times of Israel , All Rights Reserved, Jonathan Rothberg aboard his superyacht Gene Machine with his home coronavirus test, Detect. Your browser is antiquated and no longer supported on this website. The consequences of this breakthrough for personalized health, forensic investigation, and the study of human prehistory, to take only a few examples, have been breathtaking; in 2016, President Barack Obama bestowed upon him the National Medal of Technology and Innovation for his achievement. Jonathan was just thinking out loud at all times, and not random thoughts but practical ones, so having him drive a car wasnt really a safe thing to do, he said. As a result, they were going to have to price the kit at something like thirty-five dollars, at least initially, rather than ten. The Not Impossible Awards were created by Mick Ebeling, Founder of Not Impossible Labs, to recognize the work and stories of people and companies who share our mission to create technology for the sake of humanity, says Ebeling. June 17, 2021 . Husband and wife had to isolate from each other, not only because of her job, but because their daughter has a rare genetic disorder and needs to take immunosuppressive medication. The Broad Institute had provided label printers for the collected samples, which would be regularly dispatched by courier for the hour-long trip north to their lab. A molecular biophysics and biochemistry major, Wang studies proteins and their importance in designing drugs. In February, a company called New England Biolabs published a preprint of a LAMP-based COVID-19 protocolnot a test, per se, but a relatively simple lab procedurethat had been validated by Chinese collaborators with patient samples from Wuhan. In 1999, Rothberg and Gould had a son, who turned blue after birth and was rushed to the NICU. Youre telling me that the kids are responsible and not the school? he said. For weeks, the team had been talking to various state governments, private colleges, large public-university systems, and major sports leagues. [citation needed], Dr. Rothberg founded Liminal in 2018 with the goal of building a wearable brain monitor for acute and chronic conditions including stroke, traumatic brain injury, hydrocephalus, and epilepsy. Person Details. 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. He subsequently created semiconductor chip-based sequencing, using it to sequence the genome of Gordon Moore, namesake of Moores law, on a semiconductor chip another first in science. Winner of The Wall . When he was giving a talk in lab meetings, Artavanis-Tsakonas said, he would have a little note at the bottom of the slide saying, This is proprietary information, which was annoying to me but was also very funny. Artavanis-Tsakonas went on, If he had an idea he would follow it up, not like many smart people in the lab who would think of something big, would start, and then with the first difficulty would let it go. Rothberg founded his first company, CuraGen, right out of grad school. The sequencing itself will take place at 4Catalyzer, the company Jonathan Rothberg founded in 2014 to accelerate medical breakthroughs. 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. 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. "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. [3] It was able to read 10 million base pairs of DNA in two hours, and sold for $50,000. (Courtesy), Jonathan Rothberg is seeking approval for a home coronavirus test to help turn the tide of the pandemic. He lifted his clunky black wraparound sunglasses up and to the side, rested them askance on the frames of his prescription pair, and gestured to his marine habitat. Most people are familiar with only a few types of bacteria, like salmonella, E. coli, and listeria, but there are actually about one trillion species of bacteria on Earth, according to scientific estimates. AI Therapeutics - Deep Learning Precision Medicine Help us put a dent in the universe. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association is an association of independent, locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield Companies. Winning the award for healthcare innovation. Rothberg, who is sensitive to the criticism that his own innovations are merely low-rent versions of better technologies, was determined in this case to make no compromises. His close friend and first business partner, Greg Went, ferried him back to Connecticut for vacations. Gene Machine - Forbes Jonathan Rothberg Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth, Family Visit store.butterflynetwork.com for prices in your country's currency. Unlike other news outlets, we havent put up a paywall. Large research universities had the expertise, equipment, and authorization to do their own lab work. [3] By the next year it had a market cap of $5 billion, bigger than that of American Airlines. That makes me feel really terribleI just wanted kids to have a normal experience.. As Elana Rothberg was treading in the Arctic Ocean off a Norwegian glacier last summer, a drysuit and sweats staving off the cold, she wondered what could be living in the water around her. New York City, NY. 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, https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17621/internet-explorer-downloads. Abbott said that the findings were not consistent with other studies, and the White House continued to rely on them.) By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. By the time he boarded the Gene Machine, he felt that he could not afford to tarry. content: More Business Video; His doctoral adviser, Spyros Artavanis-Tsakonas, now an emeritus professor of cell biology at Harvard Medical School, described Rothberg to me as perhaps the most original person Ive met in my life, ever. Rothberg was an unusually wide-ranging and syncretic thinker, interested in the possibilities of biotech long before the word was in common circulation, and a businessman from his first day of grad school. 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. 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. But it was well worth it.. Theyre important to the ecosystem and theyre literally in the seawater that we swim in and play in.. 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. Other universitiesU.N.C. His contributions; cloning by limited dilution, and massively parallel DNA sequencing, are the basis of all subsequent high-speed sequencing methods. A potentially infectious swab had to be handled, and eventually disposed of, in accordance with the proper biohazard protocols. 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. The customer reception[26] and press coverage[27] of the product has been overwhelmingly positive. Quantum-Si will host a conference call to discuss the appointment of Dr. Jonathan Rothberg as Interim CEO today, February 14, 2022, at 5:00 PM Eastern Time. 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. Our own nucleic-acid tests are going to complement lab tests where you want that accuracywhen you have a child with an immune deficiency, or when you have a pregnant wife. Ultimately, for Rothberg, its all about benefiting those he loves, and helping the less fortunate. Hes proud that his portable MRI is being offered to 40 low-resource countries that never had telemedicine before. 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 nations highest honor for technological achievement. As for his coronavirus test, he said, The moment its approved, well be able to increase testing to those who are most vulnerable and alleviate doctors. 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]). [17] The iQ received 13 different device clearances from the Food and Drug Administration. On June 1st, I visited a strip-mall clinic in the Meadowlands of New Jersey, one of the very few local venues to offer the service, and texted Rothberg a photo of my all-clear. I liked having a nucleic-acid test before I brought someone onto my boat, for example, where the attack rate wouldve been horrible.. Recently, the F.D.A. margin: 16px auto 0; Once registered, youll receive our Daily Edition email for free. With such a device, Rothberg wrote on Twitter, read-out would be in minutes - timer in App - read by camera in your smart phone. font: 700 23px/25px Belizio,Georgia,Droid Serif,serif; Mason, who was running an open-access online LAMP research group, assumed that at least one of the dozen or so LAMP teams would hit upon a viable one-pot solution by the winter, if not sooner. [18] In February 2021 Butterfly Network was publicly listed on the NYSE under the ticker $BFLY. 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. .galleries:after { While Rothbergs children worked out with kettlebells on yoga mats behind us, I took myself through the steps of the test: swirl the swab, which resembles a thin dental pick, in each nostril five times; submerge it into a microcentrifuge tube the size of a sharks tooth; replace the cap, which contains a single white magic beada set of lyophilized, or freeze-dried, reagentsin an open cage structure, and shake until the beads contents dissolve. My test failed to register a conclusive result. 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. 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. Dr. Rothberg previously founded and served as Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Technology Officer of Ion Torrent Systems, Inc. from 2007 to 2010, and founded and served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of RainDance Technologies, Inc. from 2004 to 2009. . Dr. Jonathan Rothberg, founder and chairman of Butterfly Network (NYSE:BFLY) has a long track record of solving and scaling the impossible. 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.