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Rothberg Returns With Star Trek-Like Medical Device To Create Images And Cut With Sound Waves

This article is more than 9 years old.

When we last left Jonathan Rothberg, the entrepreneur who first throttled DNA sequencing onto its Moore’s Law-beating path, he was leaving behind his genetics work in the tangle of Thermo Fisher’s $14 billion purchase of Life Technologies , which had previously bought his startup, Ion Torrent.

Rothberg, one of the most colorful entrepreneurs in biotech, went strangely quiet for eighteen months. Now he’s back with a new incubator (called 4Combinator) and a new startup, Butterfly Network, into which he has put $20 million of his own money and $80 million more from investors to develop a device that sounds like it’s right out of Star Trek: an ultrasound scanner that can give vivid images quickly and cheaply, and that will eventually be able to use beams of concentrated sound to perform some types of surgical procedures.

It’s one of three companies – including a drug company and another started to create tools for physicists – that Rothberg is building.

“If you’re a great programmer and a great deep learning expert, you don’t have to help Netflix pick the best movie for the client,” says Rothberg. “You can help people pick the right cancer drug.”

The Butterfly Network ultrasound device, like much of Rothberg’s work, sprung from his interest in tuberosclerosis, a genetic disease that afflicts 50,000 Americans and causes benign tumors in the heart, kidney, skin, lungs, eyes and brain, where seizures can occur. Rothberg’s oldest daughter suffers from it, and he has run a charitable institute that funds research into the disorder.

Rothberg had been impressed by doctors who used ultrasound to not only image tumors in the kidneys of some patients with TSC, but also to break them apart. The problem: getting the images took days and at least $2 million worth of equipment, and placing the ultrasound beams was incredibly difficult.

Then he attended a conference where he saw Max Tegmark, the MIT physicist, speak about how if radioastronomy would be completely different if it were completed from scratch using Moore’s Law-era technology. Rothberg was fascinated, and approached Tegmark afterward and told him he couldn’t come up with a business plan to use Tegmark’s techniques in astronomy, but he saw a way forward in medicine.

“The bottleneck for me is not money, it’s not opportunity, it’s having the first person on the team,” says Rothberg.

Tegmark had that first person, an MIT electrical engineer who had triple-majored in math, physics, and engineering who had always wanted to start a company. That researcher, Nevada Sanchez, became the co-founder of Butterfly. Rothberg says that the imaging device may be available in just 18 months, although the ability to use the device to target tumors with ultrasound will take longer.

It’s a big leap, both in that it’s a new technology and in that Rothberg, who has until now focused on starting one company at a time, is now doing three with the goal of starting more. Ion Torrent failed to succeed in unseating the main player in DNA sequencing, Illumina of San Diego, because its technology did not improve fast enough and because Life Technologies, which bought the company, overpriced the machines. Will Rothberg be able to do better on his own?

“The hurdles are really in the execution and in the marketplace,” says Greg Rehm of Aegis Capital, who is backing Butterfly. “Because of its performance and price points you’ll be disrupting the clinical marketplace, and that’s always a risky undertaking. We think the benefits are so great the company will be able to overcome that.”

Rothberg will also be speaking at the Forbes Healthcare Summit on December 4.