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Theranos To Shut Down Its Blood-Testing Facilities, Shrink Workforce By 40% (wsj.com)
tripleevenfall quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Theranos Inc. said it will shut down its blood-testing facilities and shrink its workforce by more than 40% (Warning: may be paywalled; alternate source). The company said it had 790 full-time employees as of August 1. The moves mark a dramatic retreat by the Palo Alto, Calif., company and founder Elizabeth Holmes from their core strategy of offering a long menu of low-price blood tests directly to consumers. Those ambitions already were endangered by crippling regulatory sanctions that followed revelations by The Wall Street Journal of shortcomings in Theranos's technology and operations. Theranos later voided all results from its proprietary device for 2014 and 2015, though the company said it wasn't aware of any patient harm resulting form its tests. Ms. Holmes said in a statement: "We will return our undivided attention to our miniLab platform. Our ultimate goal is to commercialize miniaturized, automated laboratories capable of small-volume sample testing, with an emphasis on vulnerable patient populations, including oncology, pediatrics, and intensive care."
Ms. Holmes said in a statement: "We will return our undivided attention to our miniLab platform. Our ultimate goal is to commercialize miniaturized, automated laboratories capable of small-volume sample testing, with an emphasis on vulnerable patient populations, including oncology, pediatrics, and intensive care."
What the fuck is Holmes still CEO? http://www.zerohedge.com/news/... http://www.vanityfair.com/news...
What the fuck is wrong with investors? Well like you and me we have no say what we "invest" in. Instead banks and insurance fund managers decide for us. It's not their money. They don't care. You probably have some of your savings indirectly invested in Teranos and don't even know it, and even if you do too much work to withdraw it and transfer it to an equally incompetent fund across the street. So this shit keeps happening.
There is more than that: They were also used for DNA evidence. I'm sure lawyers could drum up the wasted time caused by incorrect facts being provided as true facts would constitute harm - it certainly is a loss for the client. Have all clients been refunded? I believe otherwise there would be monetary harm. How about their loss of time - both for the original diagnosis, and further diagnosis's, and court costs and time to be compensated? Time is money, after all...
Posting just to bring back some perspective. I run the IT in quite a few labs and my wife is a lab inspector for an unnamed accrediting agency. Theranos surely is very bad (more than you know), but if you think your lab test results from your doctor are reliable, you are most likely incorrect. We joke about how labs should get a grade and hang it in the window, like restaurants do in some states. An A for only getting a 90 out of 100, a B for getting 80 out of 100, and an F for royally Fucked up lab. And yes, that restaurant that had cockroaches still got an A as it was only one violation. If you want to know any specific lab result, like your white cell count, you are often better off flipping a coin or going to a veterinarian.
As an engineer, I'm used to noisy data so was still able to find the data useful.
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Another obviously, completely incorrect reading, confirmed by a doctor-ordered test at another lab.
As a scientist (working with lots of engineers), I respectfully disagree that you are finding the data useful. You are only discarding the obviously incorrect values while keeping the non-obviously incorrect values. IOW, without a control you don't know which of the values (within the range you consider "valid") are correct and which are not.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.