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Disruptive Bloodwork Startup May Offer Mostly Vaporware
dmr001 writes: As seen previously, Palo Alto startup Theranos planned to put the power of affordable lab work directly in the hands of patients with tiny fingerprick samples taken at Walgreen's, with four hour turnaround. The company claimed their tests were "made possible by advances in the field of microfluidics." But they were cagey about methodology and didn't use FDA approved analyzers.
Now, the Wall Street Journal reports (paywalled) (among others) that all but one of Theranos' analyzers currently in use is off the shelf, and that their tiny samples may not always have been accurate. Typically cagey founder Elizabeth Holmes vigorously disputes the criticism of her $9 billion startup, but entrenched players like Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp (which do quite well charging orders of magnitude above Theranos' prices) are likely doing a happy dance.
Physicians worrying about patients bringing in their own carcinoembryonic antigen levels and Epstein Barr Virus panels to confirm their Internet diagnoses of cancer and chronic fatigue may also be breathing sighs of relief, albeit with bittersweet regret at the potential loss of the price advantage and milliliter samples.
Now, the Wall Street Journal reports (paywalled) (among others) that all but one of Theranos' analyzers currently in use is off the shelf, and that their tiny samples may not always have been accurate. Typically cagey founder Elizabeth Holmes vigorously disputes the criticism of her $9 billion startup, but entrenched players like Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp (which do quite well charging orders of magnitude above Theranos' prices) are likely doing a happy dance.
Physicians worrying about patients bringing in their own carcinoembryonic antigen levels and Epstein Barr Virus panels to confirm their Internet diagnoses of cancer and chronic fatigue may also be breathing sighs of relief, albeit with bittersweet regret at the potential loss of the price advantage and milliliter samples.
that all but one of Theranos' analyzers currently in use is off the shelf,
What. Wait.... Is it supposed to be on the shelf? Is there something missing?
TFA in Business Insider just complained about the membership of the Board of Directors (which is weird).
And finally, ** 10 billion dollars ** for a startup that does essentially the same thing as everybody else but maybe undercuts price and probably violates the law in 45 states?
I'm in the wrong business.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Further proof that, far more often than not, "disruptive" means ignoring the law for as long as humanly possible while hoping that your competitors can't (or won't) follow suit.
I can't wait for "disruptive" medicine as practiced by anyone with internet access and a hyperlink to WebMD.
Anything to disrupt Quest Diagnostics. I wouldn't use this new outfit because they sound sort of shady, but I won't do business with Quest either. Their prices are insanely high, and they always automatically bill the patient first instead of billing the insurance because they know the insurance will adjust it down to a contracted reasonable price. I have had to spend thousands of dollars of my time on the phone with this company just to get them to bill the insurance company. They have threatened me with debt collection over a debt which I would have happily paid if only they would submit it to the insurance company so I knew how much I actually owed. I certainly didn't owe them the full amount they stated. I have repeatedly told doctors not not to send my bloodwork to Quest, but I guess they are a monopoly or the doctors get kickbacks because they always send the bloodwork to them, without first getting signoff from you about which tests will be performed or getting agreement to pay from you.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Even the best testing panels have only found markers for CFS in a statistical manner.
That is - you take a hundred people with CFS, a hundred people without CFS, and you can with certainty tell which group is which.
However, you can't with any useful result test a single individual.
The false positive rate is 45%, and the false negative rate is 45% or so.
CFS is not one disease, it is almost certainly many.
CEO Elizabeth Holmes is fucking gorgeous!
Unfortunately, she sounds like a man.
Hottest. Vader. Impression. Ever.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Silicon Valley and the media want so bad for a successful female "founder" that it hasn't gotten off its knees for this woman.
"10 years in stealth mode" is hilarious
Anyone else would have been laughed out of the room with what has come out about Theranos as of late. Claims too good to be true dreamt up by a college kid? Yep, they are probably too good to be true.
and they're apparently in some cases, using standard off the self testing equipment and simply diluting the sample because they don't collect enough blood.
From the Business Insider article:
"stopped using its signature finger-prick blood test on all but one of its more than 240 blood tests at the request of government regulators who are looking into the company's technology"
That sounds to me like the FDA doesn't think the right paperwork has been filed, and have told them to lay off till they clear up the proof that it works.
Note: that does NOT mean that the FDA doesn't think it works. The FDA seldom has a clue themselves unless there are wide-spread complains - the onus is on the manufacturer of the device to prove that it does what the manufacturer says it does. And this looks to me like the FDA doesn't have enough paperwork yet to be convinced.
As to the composition of the board: There's nothing inherently wrong there, but when dealing with the FDA, having people who've already been through the process of approving something can be helpful. But there's also plenty of consultants who can help a company through that maze, so it's really not that big of deal in my mind.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
Are you sure she exists? She looks like a digital animation to me.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Hottest. Vader. Impression. Ever.
I dunno... having her shout out "I am your father!" at the wrong moment would probably leave me needing years of therapy afterward.
#DeleteChrome
You say insurance is a rip-off. Amen to that.
But you also say that is "necessary"... You mention following epithets: Debt collection scum, considering anti-trust regulators, calling them a glorified discount program.
Yet all of this "necessary"?
Insurance is a relatively new invention, and like, many new inventions, are not necessarily designed to defend consumers.
In medieval ages Arab medicine was considered one of the best in the world. Chinese medicine was also highly advanced. All of the medicine prior to the XX century, whether advanced or not, had one thing in common and it was pay-as-you-go-basis.
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If barbers and hairstylists were smarter, they would start their own hair cut procedure medical plan. After all, you will not start cutting hair yourself. You also need a training too.
if you look carefully at many of her pictures, especially close-up shots, she looks like someone who wears a latex mask. Maybe it's Steve Jobs underneath, that would explain the voice and how she dresses.
lucm, indeed.
I'd rather trust 10B of funding than an article on the WSJ
That's what Enron shareholders used to say.
lucm, indeed.
The minute you have a backup plan, you've admitted you're not going to succeed." -Elizabeth Holmes
It's always easy to be brave with other people's money.
lucm, indeed.
They have a product. And from what I've read it can reliably handle something like 18 different tests. What is still questionable is their goal to reach 200+ tests in one go. But they are still working on it. So here we have a hit piece turning the perfect into the enemy of the good.
Personal attacks on company's 'cagey' CEO and corporation in the first two paragraphs.
This couldn't possibly be a biased post at all.
So sick of spin and hype...
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
sorry if this sounds confusing but it's not easy to speak techcrunch'y when you're not a native english speaker like me
Dude, I'm a native English speaker and I'm a software developer working in Silicon Valley, and I can't speak TechCrunchese either, nor can most of my coworkers for that matter. Your version sounds about right though. I think the people who are really fluent in it must take classes in college or something. (Or maybe this is what Stanford fraternity membership gets you?)
In other words, you are a quack that believes in homeopathy? I'll thank the FDA for keeping you away from treating people in the US.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?