Jonathan M. Rothberg
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Jonathan Marc Rothberg (born April 28, 1963) is an American scientist and entrepreneur. He is best known for his contributions to next-generation DNA sequencing. He works and resides in
Guilford, Connecticut Guilford is a town in New Haven County, Connecticut, United States, that borders Madison, Branford, North Branford and Durham, and is situated on I-95 and the Connecticut seacoast. The population was 22,073 at the 2020 census. History Guilfo ...
.


Early life

Rothberg was born in
New Haven, Connecticut New Haven is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound in New Haven County, Connecticut and is part of the New York City metropolitan area. With a population of 134,02 ...
to Lillian Rothberg and Henry Rothberg, a
chemical engineer In the field of engineering, a chemical engineer is a professional, equipped with the knowledge of chemical engineering, who works principally in the chemical industry to convert basic raw materials into a variety of products and deals with the ...
. Prior to Rothberg's birth, his parents founded Laticrete International, Inc. a family-owned manufacturer of products for the installation of tile and stone. As a child Jonathan went on sales calls with his father. Rothberg's family laid the foundation for his scientific career.


Education and scientific career

Rothberg earned a BS in
chemical engineering Chemical engineering is an engineering field which deals with the study of operation and design of chemical plants as well as methods of improving production. Chemical engineers develop economical commercial processes to convert raw materials int ...
with an option in
biomedical engineering Biomedical engineering (BME) or medical engineering is the application of engineering principles and design concepts to medicine and biology for healthcare purposes (e.g., diagnostic or therapeutic). BME is also traditionally logical sciences ...
from
Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
in 1985. He then went on to earn an MS,
MPhil The Master of Philosophy (MPhil; Latin ' or ') is a postgraduate degree. In the United States, an MPhil typically includes a taught portion and a significant research portion, during which a thesis project is conducted under supervision. An MPhil m ...
, and
PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...
in
biology Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...
from
Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...
. Rothberg himself holds more than 100 patents.


Business career


CuraGen

While a graduate student at Yale, he founded CuraGen, one of the first
genomics Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of biology focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes as well as its hierarchical, three-dim ...
companies in 1991. CuraGen went public in 1999. By the next year it had a market cap of $5 billion, bigger than that of American Airlines. Rothberg resigned as chief executive of CuraGen in 2005.


454 Life Sciences

In 2000,
454 Life Sciences 454 Life Sciences was a biotechnology company based in Branford, Connecticut that specialized in high-throughput DNA sequencing. It was acquired by Roche in 2007 and shut down by Roche in 2013 when its technology became noncompetitive, although ...
was founded as a subsidiary of CuraGen; Rothberg was the CEO of CuraGen at the time. The idea for 454 Life Sciences came when Noah, his second child, was born in 1999, and had to be sent to the neonatal intensive care unit because of breathing troubles. 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. Rothberg brought to market a machine for massively parallel DNA sequencing. 454 Life Sciences and the
Baylor College of Medicine Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) is a medical school and research center in Houston, Texas, within the Texas Medical Center, the world's largest medical center. BCM is composed of four academic components: the School of Medicine, the Graduate Sc ...
Genome Center were the first to complete and make public the sequence of an individual human genome (
James D. Watson James Dewey Watson (born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist. In 1953, he co-authored with Francis Crick the academic paper proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Watson, Crick and ...
Project Jim: Watson’s Personal Genome Goes Public
at Bio-IT World.com
). Published in ''
Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...
'' magazine, that genome was made publicly on GenBank and browsable via the efforts of
Lincoln Stein Lincoln David Stein is a scientist and Professor in bioinformatics and computational biology at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. Education Stein completed a Doctor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a PhD in Cell Biology at H ...
's group contributing to personal genomics.James Watson's Personal Genome Sequence
Rothberg lost control of 454 Life Sciences by 2007. The company was acquired by Roche Diagnostics in 2007 for $140 million then closed down by Roche in 2013 after other approaches to sequencing rendered the underlying technology noncompetitive. In 2004, Rothberg founded RainDance Technologies, which used droplet-based microfluidics. RainDance was acquired in 2017 by Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc.


Ion Torrent

Rothberg founded
Ion Torrent Ion semiconductor sequencing is a method of DNA sequencing based on the detection of hydrogen ions that are released during the polymerization of DNA. This is a method of "sequencing by synthesis", during which a complementary strand is built base ...
in 2007, which developed
ion semiconductor sequencing Ion semiconductor sequencing is a method of DNA sequencing based on the detection of hydrogen ions that are released during the polymerization of DNA. This is a method of "sequencing by synthesis", during which a complementary strand is built based ...
, a technology utilized by their Personal Genome Machine (PGM) DNA sequencer.Ion Torrent Official Webpage.
He founded the company with an undisclosed amount of his own money and later took in $23 million in venture capital. After experiences at CuraGen and 454 Life Sciences, he made sure to retain supervoting share majority so he could not be forced out. At the time, the PGM device was the smallest and cheapest DNA decoder to hit the market. It was able to read 10 million base pairs of DNA in two hours, and sold for $50,000. 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.


4Catalyzer

Rothberg established a startup accelerator called 4Catalyzer in Guilford, CT, in the early 2010s. 4Catalyzer companies are positioned at the intersection of Healthcare and Technology, each tackling a different challenge with the common goal of democratizing medicine and maximizing societal impact. The companies focus on using inflection points in medicine, such as deep learning, next-generation sequencing, and the silicon supply chain, to address global healthcare challenges. 4Catalyzer companies include Butterfly Network, Quantum-Si, Hyperfine, Tesseract Health, Liminal Sciences, Detect, AI Therapeutics, and Protein Evolution, Inc.


Butterfly Network

In 2011, Rothberg founded Butterfly Network after seeing a talk by MIT physicist Max Tegmark, who was becoming fascinated by artificial intelligence. 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. Butterfly Network sells a hand-held ultrasound imaging device that connects to an iPhone, called the iQ. The core technology is a silicon chip, contrasting with other ultrasound devices that use piezoelectric crystals. The use of silicon makes the device far cheaper to manufacture. The iQ received 13 different device clearances from the Food and Drug Administration. The iQ sells for just over $2,000, and is now commercially available. In September, 2018, Butterfly Network raised $250 million from investors Fidelity, the Gates Foundation, and
Fosun Pharma Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical (Group) Co., Ltd. (trade name: Fosun Pharma) is a Chinese pharmaceutical company. It is mostly owned by Fosun International. As of 2018, the A shares of the company is a constituent of SSE 180 Index as well as it ...
at an estimated $1.25 billion valuation. In February 2021 Butterfly Network was publicly listed on the NYSE under the ticker $BFLY.


Quantum-Si

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. In 2021 Quantum-Si went public on the NASDAQ under the ticker $QSI. In February 2022, Rothberg became interim CEO of Quantum-Si.


Hyperfine

In 2014, Rothberg founded Hyperfine to develop the world's first portable MRI scanner that can be transported easily between patients and costs a fraction of traditional MRI. Hyperfine received FDA clearance in 2021 to add deep-learning algorithms to boost the quality of images. 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. Hyperfine went public in December 2021 and is listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker, $HYPR.


Detect

Dr. Rothberg launched Detect in partnership with consumer electronics veteran and now Detect CEO
Hugo Barra Hugo Barra (born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil) is a Brazilian computer scientist, technology executive and entrepreneur. From 2008 to 2013, he served in a number of product management roles at Google in London and California, including Vice Presi ...
at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic with the goal of bringing rapid, affordable lab-quality pathogen testing into the home. Detect’s first product is the FDA-authorized Detect Covid-19 Test, the most affordable molecular (i.e. PCR-quality) rapid test in the U.S., which they brought to market in a record-setting 18 months from company founding. The customer reception and press coverage of the product has been overwhelmingly positive. As the emphasis on Covid-19 subsides, Detect is focused on building a robust roadmap of the lowest cost, highest quality at-home diagnostics products in their industry, and a full stack of services that enables them to sell 'total solutions' into the healthcare payer landscape. Detect is building a future where people test themselves for infections, chronic disease and wellness in the comfort and privacy of their home. Their initial focus is on common infectious disease management, specifically Covid+Flu, Strep Throat, and STIs—which are collectively responsible for an economic burden north of $50B annually in the U.S. alone—and over the next few years they will expand into the even-larger multi hundred billion dollar chronic disease management market. Their long-term northstar is a universal personal diagnostic device that will be a cornerstone of a societal-level shift to individual health empowerment and preventative care.


Tesseract Health

Tesseract was founded in 2018 to build technology at the nexus of radiology and laboratory medicine on the diagnostic tree. 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.


Liminal Sciences

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. 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. Liminal enables critical “brain vital signs” to make brain monitoring as ubiquitous as heart monitoring.


Protein Evolution, Inc.

PEI leverages artificial intelligence to build profitable products in the bioeconomy: the first of which is an infinite recycling solution for plastic waste.


Personal life

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. In 2002, the couple started the nonprofit Rothberg Institute for Childhood Diseases which works on treatments for
tuberous sclerosis Tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) is a rare multisystem autosomal dominant genetic disease that causes non-cancerous tumours to grow in the brain and on other vital organs such as the kidneys, heart, liver, eyes, lungs and skin. A combination ...
, a rare disease that affects one of their children. The institute ran a
distributed computing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different computer network, networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by message passing, passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed com ...
project called Community TSC until April 2009. 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. Rothberg sponsors the Rothberg Catalyzer Prize at four universities:
Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
,
Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...
,
Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...
, and
University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...
. 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. Interested in wine-making, he acquired Chamard Vineyards in nearby Clinton, CT. Rothberg owns a yacht called ''Gene Machine,'' which is equipped with a lab on board, and its support vessel, ''Gene Chaser''.


Recognition

Rothberg was awarded the
National Medal of Technology and Innovation The National Medal of Technology and Innovation (formerly the National Medal of Technology) is an honor granted by the President of the United States to American inventors and innovators who have made significant contributions to the development ...
by President
Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...
in 2016 for his “pioneering inventions and commercialization of next-generation DNA sequencing technologies, making access to genomic information easier, faster and more cost-effective for researchers around the world". Rothberg received the Connecticut Medal of Technology in 2010. In 2012, Rothberg was awarded the
Wilbur Cross Medal The Wilbur Cross Medal, or Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal for Alumni Achievement, is an award by the Yale University Graduate School Alumni Association to recognize "...distinguished achievements in scholarship, teaching, academic administration, and p ...
as a distinguished alumni from Yale University. Rothberg made
Fortune Magazine ''Fortune'' is an American multinational business magazine headquartered in New York City. It is published by Fortune Media Group Holdings, owned by Thai businessman Chatchaval Jiaravanon. The publication was founded by Henry Luce in 1929. The ...
's 2001 list of the 40 richest Americans under 40. Rothberg was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2004 for the application of engineering principles to the mining of genomic information for the discovery and development of new drugs.


References


External links

*
4Catalyzer

Butterfly Network

Quantum-Si

Hyperfine

Tesseract Health

Liminal Sciences

Detect

AI Therapeutics

Protein Evolution, Inc.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rothberg, Jonathan M. 1963 births Living people 21st-century American biologists Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering alumni Carnegie Mellon University trustees Yale University alumni