🔒On the Wings of Love: Rothberg’s revolutionary ultrasound device meets the marketplace

Jonathan Rothberg’s newest company, Butterfly Network, is headquartered in Guilford, where he lives with his wife, Bonnie and their children. But the company’s address doesn’t really matter much; Jonathan Rothberg’s workplace is the world.

That’s because he is a man on a mission. That mission? “To democratize health care by making medical imaging accessible to everyone around the world.”

And he has just the tool to do it: Butterfly iQ, a handheld ultrasound device that holds the potential to revolutionize diagnostic disease-prevention by placing it in the hands of the 15 million physicians around the globe.

Many scientists have sought to reduce the size and expense of ultrasound diagnostic machines, which were room-sized and had a six-figure pricetag. But until recently all were pursuing what Rothberg likens to Henry Ford having invented a robotic horse — instead of pioneering an entirely new, mechanical conveyance that would change the course of human history.

The key element that made Butterfly iQ practical and pregnant with commercial promise was a new type of sensor. In place of piezoelectric crystals that do the heavy lifting in conventional ultrasound imaging by projecting sound waves into the body, Butterfly iQ uses thousands of microscopic metal drums fitted onto a chip the size of a postage stamp. It then displays them as 2D images on the screen of a smartphone or other mobile device.

Rothberg’s device — and his remarkable track record of innovation and company-building, has already attracted some $360 million in investment. Today, the Butterfly iQ device has been approved for use in the UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand in addition to domestically.

That dizzying deployment trajectory Rothberg calls “blitz-scaling.” Butterfly already has four offices around the globe and Rothberg was in Europe last month opening two more offices. “We’re literally opening a new country every 15 days,” he says.

And all eyes are on an even bigger prize: “We hope to be launching in China next year,” he adds. According to the company, 4.7 billion people around the globe (out of a population of some 7 billion) lack access to medical imaging.

Few would bet against the 56-year-old scientist and “swashbuckling” entrepreneur (according to Forbes magazine) who pioneered next-generation DNA sequencing while still a grad student at Yale when he started CuraGen Corp. in 1991. The native New Havener also has business in his blood: His family started Laticrete International, a Woodbridge manufacturer of tile and stone installation products, where as a boy he went on sales calls with his father.

CuraGen was one of the pioneering companies in the genomics industry. In 1999 he took it public; a year later CuraGen had a market cap of $5 billion — larger than that of American Airlines. And a year after that (2001) Rothberg had made Fortune Magazine’s list of the 40 richest Americans under the age of 40.

Rothberg resigned as CEO CuraGen in 2005 (four years later it was sold to CellDex Therapeutics for $94.5 million) to devote his energies full-time to 454 Life Sciences, a company that had been born five years earlier as a CuraGen subsidiary. The idea for 454 came when Noah, his second child, was born in 1999, and had to be sent to the neonatal ICU for 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.

Rothberg ceded control of 454 in 2007 when it was acquired by Roche Diagnostics for $155 million. (Roche shut the company down six years after that after subsequent-generation sequencing technologies rendered 454’s underlying technology noncompetitive.) But there were more scientific breakthroughs, and more companies, in his future.

It was another family medical crisis that illuminated the brainstorm that would later take flight as Butterfly.

His young daughter had been diagnosed with a rare disease known as tuberosclerosis that required frequent monitoring via ultrasound scans. Over the course of multiple visits to the radiologist Rothberg became increasingly curious about the technology used in ultrasound imaging.

For one thing, traditional ultrasound scanners were room-sized, non-portable and very expensive — anywhere from $60,000 to $250,000 for a single unit.

Beyond the limitations of the hardware, Rothberg was struck by the disconnect between the actual diagnostic procedure and the interpretation and administration of clinical care to the end-user — the patient.

“The person operating [the ultrasound scanner during the procedure] was a technician and not even allowed to talk to the patient about the diagnosis,” Rothberg explains.

With Butterfly iQ, Rothberg discovered a way to shrink the technology so it could be used with a mobile phone — thus taking it out of radiology clinics and into doctor’s offices anywhere — and to patients worldwide.

Butterfly iQ’s single probe delivers a two-dimensional image using an array of 9,000 micro-machined sensors fitted onto a tiny chip. It comes with a mobile app that interprets ultrasound images using artificial intelligence.

“Butterfly is changing the very nature of the physical exam, and empowering the primary physician who’s dealing with the patient, can talk to that patient, and empowering them to look into that body and diagnose,” Rothberg explains.

That technology, its potential universal application — and not least of all Rothberg’s track record — have attracted rarely matched attention from the investment community. The company’s most recent Series D financing round last autumn brought to $360 million Butterfly Network’s total investment to date. Funders have included Fidelity and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. That brought Butterfly Network’s paper valuation to a stunning $1.25 billion.

Also last fall, the company began shipping to more than 20,000 medical professionals who reserved devices in advance. It costs $1,999, plus a monthly fee ($35 for individuals) for the software that makes the images crisp and the device usable in tandem with a smartphone.

This fall Rothberg is taking Butterfly iQ around the country — and around the world to a medical diagnostic marketplace primed for this kind of breakthrough product. “ We have at least a quarter-century of built-up demand,” Rothberg says. “At [trade] shows people come up to us and say, ‘This is the most exciting medical breakthrough in 25 years.’”

“I had never had product-market fit,” to match Butterfly iQ, Rothberg says. “We’ll sell more ultrasounds in our first 18 months of production than the rest of the world did [sell traditional ultrasound machines] in the last 50 years.”

But that’s only part of the story.

“We’re just getting started,” says Rothberg of Butterfly iQ. “Now we’re as good as a $60,000 or $100,000 [ultrasound] machine; in a year we’ll be as good as a $200,000 machine. And in three years there won’t be anything as good.”

In terms of re-envisioning and reinventing technologies, software and hardware capable of transforming medical science, Rothberg has been down this road before.

An earlier “lightbulb” evolved into a company called Ion Torrent, which developed and in 2010 began selling a sequencer called the Personal Genome Machine, representing a dramatic diminution in size and price of sequencing machines.

In writing about the new device the New York Times said its inventor “fancies himself the Steve Jobs of technology. He wants to do for DNA sequencing what Mr. Jobs did for computing — spread it to the masses.” The next year he sold Ion Torrent for $375 million in cash and stock plus up to $350 million in future payments based on revenue milestones.

Timothy M. Shannon MD, who in 2007 succeeded Rothberg as president and CEO of CuraGen after heading R&D for the company, calls Rothberg “one of the most brilliant people I’ve met — a one-of-a-kind entrepreneur. He sees things five years before other people see [the same] possibilities.”

He describes his entrepreneurial track record leading up to, and now including, Butterfly and six other new business ventures he’s working on with a fervor that is almost messianic.

“Each one of the companies I start is because I need to help somebody I love,” Rothberg says. “It’s not seven bets and one pays for the other six; it’s seven things that I need in the world to be there when someone I love needs it.”

Rothberg started Butterfly after seeing a talk about artificial intelligence by MIT physicist Max Tegmark. He recruited one of Tegmark’s smartest students, Nevada Sanchez, as a co-founder; Sanchez was on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2015.

To grow Butterfly, in addition to investing $20 million of his own money, “We found investors [such as the Gates Foundation] that were aligned with our mission. Our first goal is to maximize societal impact — not profits. The profits will follow.”

And when his career draws to a close some day down the road, “I want to have no regrets,” he says.

But while he’s still around, Jonathan Rothberg has another goal.

“I want to change the course of history,” he says.

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Jonathan Rothberg and five other area innovators and entrepreneurs will be honored at an event on Oct. 30, "60 Ideas in 60 Minutes."