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Jonathan Rothberg
Jonathan Marc Rothberg (born April 28, 1963) is an American scientist and entrepreneur notable for his contributions to DNA sequencing. He resides in Miami, Florida.
Rothberg was born in New Haven, Connecticut, to Lillian Rothberg and Henry Rothberg, a chemical engineer. 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.
Rothberg earned a BS in chemical engineering with an option in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1985. He then went on to earn an MS, MPhil, and PhD in biology from Yale University.
Rothberg himself holds more than 100 patents.
While a graduate student at Yale, he founded CuraGen, one of the first genomics companies in 1991. CuraGen became a public company via an initial public offering 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.
In 2000, 454 Life Sciences 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 Genome Center were the first to complete and make public the sequence of an individual human genome (James D. Watson). 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. 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.
Rothberg founded Ion Torrent in 2007, which developed ion semiconductor sequencing, a technology utilized by their Personal Genome Machine (PGM) DNA sequencer. 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.
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Jonathan Rothberg
Jonathan Marc Rothberg (born April 28, 1963) is an American scientist and entrepreneur notable for his contributions to DNA sequencing. He resides in Miami, Florida.
Rothberg was born in New Haven, Connecticut, to Lillian Rothberg and Henry Rothberg, a chemical engineer. 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.
Rothberg earned a BS in chemical engineering with an option in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1985. He then went on to earn an MS, MPhil, and PhD in biology from Yale University.
Rothberg himself holds more than 100 patents.
While a graduate student at Yale, he founded CuraGen, one of the first genomics companies in 1991. CuraGen became a public company via an initial public offering 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.
In 2000, 454 Life Sciences 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 Genome Center were the first to complete and make public the sequence of an individual human genome (James D. Watson). 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. 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.
Rothberg founded Ion Torrent in 2007, which developed ion semiconductor sequencing, a technology utilized by their Personal Genome Machine (PGM) DNA sequencer. 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.