John is the President and CEO of AmberGen, having first joined the company in July 2015 as Vice-President Product and Business Development. An experienced executive, entrepreneur, biomedical engineer and inventor, he formerly led worldwide Research and Development for 3 Johnson & Johnson businesses including multibillion dollar Ethicon Products. He founded consulting firm Clover Medical; is a principal at startup Origami Surgical; served as General Manager, North America for a subsidiary of automotive supplier Valeo; and held product development leadership positions at Baxter Healthcare.
John holds an MBA in General Management from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, as well as a BS in Biomedical Engineering and an MS in Electrical Engineering from Boston University. He served on the Industrial Advisory Board for the Boston University Department of Biomedical Engineering, and his products have won the Canon Publications Medical Design Excellence Award (MDEA) three times. John is co-inventor on 24 US patents.
Dr. Lim received his Ph.D. at Boston University’s Department of Biology where he gained extensive training in cell biology, physiology, proteomics and mass spectrometry. During this period he developed novel reversible colorimetric and luminescent metal chelate-based protein dyes for proteomics which are widely used in the Life Sciences.
Since that time, Dr. Lim has spent more than 20 years in the biotechnology industry. His work at AmberGen has been synergistic with and culminated in the development its current photocleavable mass-tag based MALDI-IHC spatial biology approach for the molecular imaging of tissues, as applied to both ‘omics’ based research and discovery as well as clinical pathology. His early work at AmberGen on photocleavable (PC) linkers and tRNA-based protein engineering was instrumental in the commercialization of its first generation of photocleavable and protein labeling products including PC-Biotin, PC-Phosphoramidites and fluorescent tRNAs. These products have been commercialized for research use in partnership with several major vendors of biomolecular reagents. In the disease biomarker space, he led the development of several blood-based immunodiagnostics including for cancer, autoimmune disease and allergy in collaboration with leading biomedical institutes such as Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital. As part of these efforts, Dr. Lim directed an NIH-supported project which led to the discovery and patenting of two novel autoantigen biomarkers for the autoimmune liver disease PBC, with the assays currently undergoing FDA-clearance in a licensing agreement with INOVA Diagnostics. He also led the development a new biomarker and drug discovery technology known as photocleavable bead-array mass spectrometry (PC-BAMS) which is synergistic with MALDI-IHC technology.
Dr. Lim is co-inventor on 12 issued U.S. patents in the biotechnology space and the author of more than 15 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles. Dr. Lim is currently leading AmberGen’s development of its innovative MALDI-IHC tissue imaging technology.
Dr. Rothschild has been an innovator in biotechnology for the past 35 years, making important contributions to the fields of membrane protein biophysics, vibrational spectroscopy, nanotechnology, mass spectrometric imaging and molecular diagnostics.
He holds 56 issued U.S. patents and is the author of over 150 publications in major scientific journals. Distinctions include General Motors Scholar, Fellow of the Sloan Foundation, Fellow of National Research Council, Established Investigator of the American Heart Association, Fellow of the American Physical Society and Fellow of the Biophysical Society. He was recently elected to the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) which honors contributions from inventors, who have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and welfare of society.
Dr. Rothschild is an Emeritus Professor of Physics at Boston University, where he is Director of the Molecular Biophysics Laboratory. He also holds faculty appointments at the BU School of Medicine, Photonics Center, which he helped co-found, Nanotechnology Innovation Center and Center for Bioinformatics at Boston University.
Dr. Rothschild received his Ph.D. in Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.