Hello, I'm Ashlee Vance. And here we are for another episode of Hello World from Home.
We have acquired toilet paper, thanks to my wife's valiant efforts, which is good.
And what's even better is today we are going to talk to Jonathan Rothberg, a very famous scientist,
especially in the gene sequencing world. He happens to be quarantined in Florida on his yacht,
which is called the Gene Machine and has a laboratory on it.
And as this virus started to hit and moved across the world,
Jonathan swung his businesses to attack it in a few different ways.
And so let's go check in with Jonathan and see what he's been up to.
So you have five, five kids. All on the boat or...
I have five children, all on the boat. These are Noah and Elana.
Can I ask you guys a question?
Come on, guys.
What's. I mean, what is life like on a boat or a situation like this?
It's a little claustrophobic.
Yeah
We are absolutely not allowed to leave the boat.
Yeah, we can't go on the dock.
They can do water sports. And again -
No we can't. I asked you if we could go wake surfing, not allowed.
I mean so your boat, this yacht is called the the Gene Machine.
And obviously, I can see behind you. I mean, there's all this lab equipment.
Tell me the story behind this boat and why you're on it right now.
Well, I'm married to a physician. I was on the boat on vacation with the kids first week of March.
And my wife was on vacation all for 48 hours till she got a note from the hospital.
All hands on deck. So she flew back. And I looked at the lab and said, wait a minute.
I spent the last 20 years making machines to analyze massive amounts of DNA. I started one of the early genomics companies.
Now I need to just tell people whether they have the virus that causes COVID-19 or they don't have it.
From what I've read, you know, a couple of stories about this,
I mean, you kind of challenged your team to to make the easiest, cheapest, quickest test for this possible,
and make it something that people could do at their home.
You don't have to have a physician. That's kind of the goal that you're after?
So what the team has done, and they've been successful at the bench in our laboratories back in Connecticut,
is make a test that you can swab your throat, or put something up your nose,
or spit into a tube, and they can determine whether someone has COVID-19 or not.
I spit in a test tube, and then I'm instantly getting an answer back on my my smartphone, and this is all happening at home?
Yes, it's all happening at home.
So how close do you feel like you guys are now to me ordering one of these and getting it in my living room here?
There's a few steps. Over the next couple of weeks, we want to validate that it works.
In parallel, we've brought in people with great manufacturing scale-up,
so we can make first thousands of these kits, then millions of these kits.
There are 300 million people just in the United States and they're not going to be tested once and done.
If you test and you have the virus, you're going to want to test again that you don't have it.
So we're focusing on something that's simple, fast, scalable.
You actually have, it's like a smorgasbord of inventions that are sort of useful here.
You have a company called Butterfly Network and you guys make...
you know, I think I think everybody's familiar with going to get an ultrasound, if you're having a kid especially,
and you go in the doctor's office and they bring out their machine,
but essentially you've tried to make a much more accessible version of the ultrasound.
Yes. I said, why don't we put an ultrasound machine on a chip, and got some smart people together.
And this is a chip that has that entire cart that you see, the hundred thousand dollar cart, put onto a chip.
And once something's in a chip, you know, you can put it in a device like this.
In this particular case, this machine has a lot of uses, right.
I mean, obviously, people are, their lungs are getting taken over, by this virus, and we want to see what what condition people are in.
When COVID-19 struck the world, luckily we had already sold over 15,000 of these devices.
Physicians immediately started to use it for looking at the lungs of these patients.
Now, the interesting thing is, there is always a gold standard. So the gold standard is a CAT scan.
But a CAT scan, it's a couple of hundred thousand dollars and it's a limited resource.
So all of a sudden now physicians are using the Butterfly IQ to triage people for, I guess, what you could call this COVID lung.
Last couple of summers, Justin and Noah interned at Butterfly. So they're experts at tele-radiology and ultrasound.
They do a demo and they scan each other.
Is it easy? It if it's not too much of a pain-
They can do it. And the interesting thing is, while they'll be scanning, there will be a guy in New York
who's actually guiding them with arrows on their screen, showing them how to do it.
So first, Justin I'm gonna tell you where to put the probe. So just move the probe out of the view for us for a moment.
Great. We're going to scan right here.
OK. So we're going to rotate your probe using augmented reality. Great, perfect, stop right there.
And now we're going to slide slightly down.
You've got these two shadows. Those are ribs. And in between, that's lung.
In an injured lung, you would see what's called B-lines, which are vertical striations.
And again, this is a tool that's being used by physicians around the world, across the United States,
to help manage patients who are ill with coronavirus.
How long is it until my, you know, my wife or myself, I can do like a little physical and see if I've got any nasty tumors growing?
All right. For real. The answer has changed. If you had asked me that a month ago or two months ago,
I would say it's three years out. But literally in the last two weeks, all the guidelines on tele-guidance, tele-radiology have changed.
We just got approval at Butterfly to do remote guidance.
And I would say when this is over, telemedicine is going to be a dominant force.
COVID has changed the way we're going to work with doctors.
What do you make of the way this was handled in the United States? You know, from the sort of CDC level, I mean, the testing that went on.
I mean, I don't know. Does this make you optimistic in some sense? Because now we have science going at this really hard
and all these people over the world coming up with innovative things, or does it make you kind of depressed?
You know, that it seems like are our governments and our systems weren't really prepared to handle something like this?
I'm an optimist. I have seven companies. And as I'm speaking to you, you know, five of them are directly impacting this.
We've focused on it. I've seen the rest of the world focus on it.
And on the guilt side, I would say that one of the things I did a few weeks ago was apologize to my children, for myself, for our own actions.
I can't blame anybody else.
In the sense that you would have kind of, maybe pursued some of these things earlier?
I've known for decades that viruses from the environment, from other animals, are an existential threat. I blame myself as much as anybody else.
I promised myself on the end of February, this would be the last pandemic where we didn't have a diagnostic kit by everybody's toothbrush.
And I think many people like myself, instead of blaming other people are acting, keeping the receipt and doing everything we can.