NewHavenBIZ

n e w h a v e n b i z . c o m | J a n u a r y 2 0 2 0 | n e w h a v e n B I Z 23 Hyperfine MRI Continued on Page 24 which is awaiting U.S. Food & Drug Administration clearance. e innovator behind this five- year-old startup is New Haven-born genomics pioneer Jonathan Roth- berg, a serial entrepreneur with a successful track record for com- mercializing revolutionary medical inventions. Rothberg, who lives in Guilford, is best known for inventing inex- pensive and accessible high-speed DNA sequencing. He won the National Medal of Technology and Innovation for his work in 2015. More recently, his Butterfly Net- work introduced a pocket-sized ul- trasound device that connects to an iPhone and costs less than $2,000. at startup became a health technology unicorn valued at $1.25 billion in 2018 following a $250 million investment by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Fidelity and others. e device is now being used in 20 countries. Rothberg's latest prototype has the potential to be another game-changer, bringing magnet- ic resource imaging not only to hospital bedsides, but onto cruise ships, into ambulances and major sporting venues — perhaps even to clinics housed inside pharmacy chains like Walgreens. (Rothberg says all of the above have ap- proached him about the device.) But like all of Rothberg's com- panies, Hyperfine also has a higher purpose: to make MRI available to the 4 billion people who lack access to medical imaging around the globe — particularly those in devel- oping countries, where the nearest MRI can be a plane ride away. "We don't want your access to an MRI machine or an ultrasound to be a chance of your birth," Roth- berg says. "We want to make sure that it's available to anybody, so it's low-cost, it's easy to use and it's there when somebody you love needs it." The ripe time e idea for a portable MRI machine had been germinating in Rothberg's mind for decades, but the timing wasn't right until several years ago, he says. In 2014, he started brainstorming about how he could leverage the recent revolution in green electronics (including advances in magnets to power wind turbines and electric cars), and the "10-million-fold" increase in computing power since MRI first became commercially available in the 1980s, to transform a conventional MRI into something smaller, cheaper and more accessible. "It has to be possible now," he recalls thinking. So on an April weekend, he gathered some of the world's leading engineers and scientists for a retreat on his boat, the Gene Machine, and told them that they wouldn't be returning to port until they came up with a plan to re-invent MRI. As the yacht sailed off the Florida coast, Rothberg laid out his challenge: Design something that could be wheeled into any hospital room, powered through a standard wall outlet and operated by a person without any specialized training. His final demand: It needed to be built for $10,000 or less. "ey said you've completely lost your mind. is just isn't possible. But I reinforced that it's my captain, my boat," he jokes. "You're going to figure it out." Within 100 days of that retreat, Rothberg had a working prototype and his first portable MRI scan: a 3-D color image of a green bell pepper, which has roughly the same molecular makeup as the human brain. "We hadn't done any testing yet so we couldn't put a person in it," he says. Aer working five years in stealth mode to perfect the device, the company introduced it last October at the American College of Emergency Physicians annual conference in Denver. Rothberg says conference-goers were lining up for brain scans right on the trade-show floor. "Some people wrote on Twitter that it has to be a parlor trick. Because you cannot use an MRI in an open space in the middle of a conference with all of that electronic interference," he says. "No one had ever had an MRI machine on the floor of a conference that was turned on." So how does Hyperfine's MRI take images without being shielded in a special room? For one, the machine operates with a magnetic field 20 to 40 times lower than conventional MRI. Instead of using a using a powerful magnet to create images, Hyperfine's MRI relies on high-powered computing, Rothberg explains. With only 1/30th the magnetic strength of a conventional MRI, there's no danger of metal objects like pens, keys or oxygen tanks being hurled into the machine. e company then adapted noise-canceling technology (think headphones) to block radio frequency noise, effectively eliminating interference from lights, cellphones and the like. (e Dolby family, maker of noise- canceling headphones, liked the idea so much they invested in the company, Rothberg says.) "Now the key is how do we make the image quality good enough so that it can answer those clinical questions that we need and not require this really big, expensive system?" says Hyperfine Chief Scientific Officer John Martin, a vascular surgeon who is also CSO for Butterfly. "I think with some of the applications we're well on our way there. We're awaiting FDA clearance, but we're on the cusp of getting that for imaging of the brain," Martin says. e company hopes eventually to get approval to image other body parts as well, such as feet, ankles and knees Hyperfine founder and serial entrepreneur Rothberg hijacked a group of scientists and engineers aboard his boat to devise a plan for a portable MRI that could be built for less than $10,000.

• Cover