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. Your browser is antiquated and no longer supported on this website. height: 5px; He earned a B.S. The sequencing itself will take place at 4Catalyzer, the company Jonathan Rothberg founded in 2014 to accelerate medical breakthroughs. Butterfly has had a very successful training program.. Rothberg pursued a Ph.D. in biology at Yale. Actors, directors, and stagehands come together to keep the heart of the city alive while awaiting a physical return to the Broadway stage. Environmental scientists now say climate change is a fundamental and imminent threat to the lives of humans and thousands of other species. Perhaps it would be Rothberg, who immediately came up with a few different potential fixes. The company aims to support the screening, diagnosis, and monitoring of disease, both affordably and non-invasively using "the power of data in the human eye". In late March, President Trump had proclaimed that the approval of the countrys first rapid-test kits, developed by Abbott Laboratories for use with their I.D. 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. The company is working to get the Butterfly iQ ultrasound scanner into the hands of as many medical professionals as possible. Johnathan Rothberg - Tufts Medical Center Community Care 781-338-7777 CAREERS Johnathan Rothberg, MD Primary Care - Internal Medicine BIO CONTACT About Johnathan Rothberg, MD Special Interests Internal medicine Education Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine, Brandeis University Additional Language (s) Spanish Residency The world and its crises felt keeningly distant. Rothberg settled into dockside life in the Bahamian port of Albany with six children between the ages of nine and twenty-four, an eight-pound Pomeranian named Versace, a crew of about a dozen, and the hope that the F.D.A. It agitates me that we messed up so badly, he said. New Haven, Conn., December 14, 2021 - Jonathan Rothberg, Ph.D., a serial entrepreneur who founded 4Catalyzer and has founded and led a number of other Connec. Your browser is antiquated and no longer supported on this website. He still is. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Rothberg explained that the approval was not for a test but for yet another protocol: the spit could be collected at home or at the office, but it still had to be sent to a specialized lab for machine processing. His mind was in some Aegean port, and he didnt seem to notice the vicious clouds of stinging gnats. We have 50 people who are full-time employees, and 100 people including consultants, who are manufacturing [the test] as Im speaking to you, one million tests a month, financing 10 million tests a month.. Rothberg opted for a specific kind of molecular test a rapid molecular test, which he says never existed before.. Rothbergs two college-age children, both at Yale, had decided to take gap semesters, and were interning for his companies from the boat. Many landlubbing researchers have had to drop everything this year to assist with the COVID-19 response, but Jewish-American scientist Jonathan Rothberg started his work fighting the pandemic at sea. Global warming has wrought dangerous algae blooms known as red tide along Americas coastlines, and the melting of polar ice caps and Arctic glaciers. Do you rely on The Times of Israel for accurate and insightful news on Israel and the Jewish world? All supplies coming on board were cleaned, and anyone entering the ship had to isolate and test for COVID-19. His daughter suffers from a disease . [citation needed], Rothberg and his wife Bonnie, a physician who also holds a Ph.D. in epidemiology from Yale, have five children, whom Rothberg often refers to in his speeches. He is most widely known, however, as a pioneer of next-generation sequencing, a major advance in the speed with which a genome could be read. content: More Business Video; 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. He hopes that his test called Detect will receive approval from the FDA. Abbott said that the findings were not consistent with other studies, and the White House continued to rely on them.) In university labs, small startups, and large life-sciences companies, researchers improvised, drawing upon a variety of techniques to compensate for the lack of national leadership. Jennifer Rachel Hoos, a daughter of Betsy S. Hoos and Dr. Jeffrey C. Hoos of Woodbridge, Conn., was married on Saturday evening to Jonathan Carl Rothberg, the son of Marilyn Rothberg and. 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. 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. Howard Forman, a professor of radiology, public health, management and economics at Yale, as well as the director of its MD/MBA program, its executive MBA program and its health care management program, noted the uniqueness of Rothbergs efforts. Detect is a highly accurate, fast, and easy molecular diagnostic COVID-19 test that does not require expensive lab equipment or a trained technician, providing trustworthy results in about an hour, he claims in a statement. Names and data used in examples on product screens are fictitious unless otherwise noted. With the exception of the heater, which Rothberg planned to do away with eventually, the design made good on everything he considered crucial. His optimism was, according to his employees, characteristic; Owen Kaye-Kauderer, a co-founder of Homodeus and one of the many bright, industrious twentysomethings with whom Rothberg regularly collaborates, told me that Rothbergs ideal company featured one domain expert surrounded by seven kids who dont know that what theyre trying to do cant be done. At the same time, Rothbergs suspicion that by the beginning of the summer there would still be an urgent need for his intervention betrayed a realism, even a pessimism, about the likelihood of a competent centralized response. 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. Summers on the yacht have become a family tradition. 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. Dr. Jonathan Rothberg is best known for inventing high-speed, "Next-Gen" DNA sequencing. Their test would require not only clinical validation data but usability trials. 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. 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. Rothberg was born in New Haven, Connecticut, to Lillian Rothberg and Henry Rothberg, a chemical engineer. 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. Rothberg, despite his general chutzpah, acknowledged that different people in different communities at different times and in different places will have different needs. As a result, they were going to have to price the kit at something like thirty-five dollars, at least initially, rather than ten. Colorimetric readout by #iOS or #Android #App w/ #geolocation & #HIPPA compliant reporting. to introduce separate regulatory tracks for diagnostic and screening purposes. Preparation is a tricky process that involves filtering the water, isolating viruses and breaking them open to access their DNA. [5], Rothberg himself holds more than 100 patents. But there is one thing even more prolific than microbes: the viruses that replicate inside of them. He earned a B.S. 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. 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. he enlisted the aid of a high-ranking executive at a major Silicon Valley firm who preferred that his involvement not yet be a matter of public record, leaving Rothberg free to play a more expansive, oracular role. The ocean is a mysterious place, says Elana, now 17 and a rising senior at Choate-Rosemary Hall. Learn more Our philosophy Building companies around a virtuous circle of learning. Rothberg was unhappy about the setback, he told me, but he retained his sunny, page-a-day-calendar outlook: The nature of developing stuff is you have to get up more than you get knocked down., He reminded himself why hed embarked on this course at the beginning. This battery-operated, wirelessly charged device uses an app to acquire and securely transmit imagery for review and diagnosis. Changing the lives of our loved ones and maximizing global impact through revolutionary technology. 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. But we cant wait for approval in terms of gearing up as Im speaking to you [were manufacturing] one million tests a month, financing 10 million tests a month. I was going to give it to him anyway, she joked. He majored in chemical engineering at Carnegie Mellon, where he was the first person in the dorms with his own Apple computer. The F.D.A.s willingness to relax its benchmark for rapid tests was, he felt, irrelevant; he liked to quote the old Hebrew National slogan, We answer to a higher authority. He spent the summer months of the slow regulatory process adrift along the Northeastern seaboard, working from moorings in Sag Harbor, Marthas Vineyard, and Guilford, Connecticut. info@jonathanrothberg.com. It survived on a string of grants from government agencies, as well as from investments from his parents and siblings; his younger brother, Michael, gave him what amounted to his life savings at the time. [1] He works and resides in Guilford, Connecticut. [2], In 2000, 454 Life Sciences was founded as a subsidiary of CuraGen; Rothberg was the CEO of CuraGen at the time. That same daughter, now grown, uses the lab for her own scientific research. 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). Rothberg decided that a good way to use his talents in the pandemic response was to develop a home coronavirus test. 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. 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. The yellowish water should be significantly different from samples of the ocean and freshwater. He developed a high-speed "Next-Gen" DNA sequencing process, motivated by the opportunity to impact the lives of the people he loves. He worked on his next company, Ion Torrent, in stealth mode for two years. 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. His introduction of massively parallel DNA sequencing technology greatly increased the speed and efficiency of genomic analysis. His net worth has been growing significantly in 2020-2021. The crew even maintains an Instagram account to highlight the Gene Machines adventures. But it was well worth it.. Our machines helped decode the Neanderthal genome, solve the disappearance of the honey bee, and enabled the age of precision medicine. 2023 Cond Nast. Jonathan Rothberg is the founder of Butterfly and has served as the Chairman of New Butterfly's board of directors since February 2021. His contributions; cloning by limited dilution, and massively parallel DNA sequencing, are the basis of all subsequent high-speed sequencing methods. Jonathan Rothberg on what motivates his research 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. His siblings could retire if they wanted to. After thirty minutes, I withdrew the tube and pressed it into the chimney portion of what looked like a small plastic pipe; a hidden razor broke open the tube and the fluid made its way down a lateral-flow strip. Elana and an intern at her fathers Guilford bioscience hub, 4Catalyzer, spent days filtering vials of water, extracting DNA and preparing the samples for sequencing, all out of a tiny lab aboard the 55-meter Amels boat. .galleries:after { Rapid tests, which were still being conducted on Abbotts I.D. In 2011, Rothberg founded Butterfly Network after seeing a talk by MIT physicist Max Tegmark, who was becoming fascinated by artificial intelligence. background-color: #c52026; 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. 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. We hope to have approval before the end of the year, Rothberg said. 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. Rothberg was known, however, for his intransigence in the face of technical challenges. 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. Rothberg and his siblings describe an unruly but loving household; as Rothberg likes to put it, My mother had seven only children. Henry had a chemistry lab in the basement, and from an early age Jonathan pursued his own unsupervised experiments. They were still at least a month away from formal validation trials with human patients and human noses. One of his latest companies, Butterfly Network, recently began selling $2,000 handheld ultrasound device that are more advanced and less expensive than those of competitors. 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. Or maybe its not. 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. Registering also lets you comment on articles and helps us improve your experience. What I had experienced in miniature was at the heart of a national debate about testing and public health. for their antigen test in April, had not yet achieved regulatory approvalthere was no shortage of entrants to the field. The F.D.A. For use by qualified and trained healthcare practitioners. [17] The use of silicon makes the device far cheaper to manufacture. That makes me feel really terribleI just wanted kids to have a normal experience.. Im hoping everybody is staying safe. Rothberg insisted that his familys maritime isolation had been no sumptuous idyll; he had spent most of his time, when he wasnt petitioning his children for a moment of their attention, scanning the emerging literature for academic experts who could answer his questions as they arose. He received Nature Methods First Method of the Year Award, The Irvington Institute's Corporate Leadership Award in Science, the Connecticut Medal of Technology, the DGKL Biochemical Analysis Prize, and an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Mount Sinai School of Medicine. The Human Genome Projectthe first composite map of a human genome, which was completed in 2003had taken thirteen years and cost about three billion dollars. He fell in love with them. Rothberg was reassured by a paper indicating that the virus could be reliably detected in the lower nostrils, and moved on to swab design. There are currently limits. 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. in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. 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. Please update your browser or switch to Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Although Rothberg had designed his kit for home diagnosis, he had been told early on that he should first pursue F.D.A. For instance, in 2017 while the yacht was in . in biology from Yale University and his B.S. Led by Founder Dr. Jonathan Rothberg, the Detect team is redesigning the future of healthcare with the power of technology. 3. 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. The test tubes had to be shaken vigorously and then flickedwords that were not entirely self-explanatorybefore being placed in the heater. First of all, all of them come from need. Elana sees the potential there too. 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. In molecular biology the last 20 years, weve had more and more complex tests, more and more complex data, Rothberg said at the conference. In the case of Jonathan Rothberg, M.S., M.Phil, and Ph.D., it began when his daughter was diagnosed with a rare disease called tuberous sclerosis, which causes tumors or growths in the body. 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. In another age or another society, a man of Rothbergs background and expertisenot only in science and technology but in manufacturing, logistics, and salesmight have been summoned to help organize a public solution. With the yacht moored, he hiked three miles into the French islands rocky interior. Think of them as the tops of little drums, all residing on a single silicon chip. [3] In 2010, Ion Torrent was acquired for $375 million in cash and stock upfront, plus as much as $350 million later if sales were to reach certain levels. On March 6, Bonnie was called back to her job as a physician at a New Haven hospital to work the night shift. Lets get a lot of these out there by Thanksgiving, he said. They hope the strands of DNA will offer leads for potential medical therapies, or other scientific discoveries, just as mapping human genomes has done over the past decade. Other countries rose to the occasion, and were able to use widespread PCR testing to track and manage their outbreaks. All of this summers samples came from distinct ecosystems along the Italian and French rivieras and the North Sea, usually flat waters close to land, rather than the open ocean so the samples represent as much diversity as possible. I think in everything I do, somewhere theres a personal motivation, Rothberg reflected at the STAT Summit. Jonathan is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, and is a life trustee of Carnegie Mellon University. At various points in his career hes considered a return to academia; in each case he has found himself haunted by a practical problem of some personal urgency, and has relapsed into commercial enterprise. But the problem of coronavirus testingthe need for reliable diagnosis of an unprecedented sweepwas a high-stakes contest of immediate appeal. Under his leadership, 454 helped understand the mystery behind the disappearance of the honey bee, uncovered a new virus killing transplant patients, and elucidated the extent of human variationwork recognized by Science magazine as the breakthrough of the year for 2007. 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. Jonathan Rothberg a pioneer in genetic sequencing technology, serial entrepreneur, Yale alumnus, and New Haven native will receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the White House announced Dec. 22. 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.. Hyperfine is promoting its portable MRI as an option for overburdened hospitals. Then I placed the tube in the small heater and clicked the timer, which was set for thirty minutes. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, and serves on . 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 technology was also used, by a team in Leipzig, to sequence the first complete Neanderthal genome. How would students be recalled from the waiting area for notification? Though some of Rothbergs earliest competitors had been held upE25Bio, the Massachusetts company that expected an E.U.A. Students were expected to return to the campus in a weeks time, and, despite the large white tent erected to replace indoor cafeteria dining, the expectant atmosphere was oddly normal. 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. Not available in Canada. [20], In February 2022, Rothberg became interim CEO of Quantum-Si. [23] The Hyperfine Swoop is commercially available and saving lives on multiple continents around the world, including limited resource settings in Africa and Asia where access to MRI was never before possible. 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.
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