Healthcare >> CEO Interviews >> January 13, 2000

Jonathan M. Rothberg – Curagen Corporation (crgn)

JONATHAN M. ROTHBERG is the Founder, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of CuraGen Corporation, a genomics-based pharmaceutical company. He founded CuraGen in 1993 at the intersection of information technology and molecular biology to manage the vast amount of information being generated by the Human Genome Project. Dr. Rothberg's vision was to develop technologies to industrialize the drug discovery and development process and systematically mine the genome to develop novel, genomics-based pharmaceutical products to treat unmet medical needs. From 1991 to 1993, Dr. Rothberg served as a postdoctoral Fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine. Dr. Rothberg earned a BS in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an MS, M. Phil. and PhD in Biology from Yale University. Since founding CuraGen, Dr. Rothberg has grown the company into one of the industry's largest genomics-based pharmaceutical companies. Expanding on his vision for the future of life sciences, Dr. Rothberg has established two new innovative organizations. In June 2000, he founded 454 Life Sciences, a majority-owned subsidiary of CuraGen, a leader in developing novel instrumentation and sub-nanoliter technologies for whole genome sequencing. In the fall of 2001, Dr. Rothberg founded The Rothberg Institute for Childhood Diseases, a non- profit research institute dedicated to discovering cures for childhood orphan diseases. The institute leverages distributed computing power to screen drug targets in silico and funds the 'wet science' validation of these in silico discoveries at the institute's own research center and through alliances with Yale, Harvard and the Chase Cancer Center. Currently, with more than 3,000 users, the distributed research effort has more computing power than the largest biotech companies, and in less than one year, has identified four drug leads. As a result of his work and accomplishments, Dr. Rothberg was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, was named an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year and was a recipient of The Irvington Institute's Corporate Leadership Award in Science. He is the author of numerous publications and has been issued a number of patents covering his scientific inventions. Profile
TWST: Let's start out by your giving us a brief overview of CuraGen

Corporation, the company's history, activities, those kinds of things.

Dr. Rothberg: CuraGen was founded to take advantage