> “I realized that I could have just as well been looking into the eyes of a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates.”
> Though Theranos is largely unknown even in Silicon Valley, that is about to change.
> Precisely how Theranos accomplishes all these amazing feats is a trade secret.
> The analyzers look like large desktop computer towers. Holmes declines to explain how they work, or even allow them to be photographed, citing the need to protect trade secrets. The company manufactures them at an unmarked facility I toured in a research park across the South Bay from Palo Alto, in Newark, Calif.
> the single most accomplished board in U.S. corporate history. It includes former U.S. Secretary of State, Treasury, and Labor George Shultz; former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry; former Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger; and former U.S. Senators Sam Nunn and Bill Frist
> In a rare if not unprecedented rout this past March, the patent holders unconditionally surrendered midtrial, stipulating to the invalidity of their own patent. As a kicker they agreed–though the presiding judge would have been powerless to order such a thing himself–to bring no additional patent suits against Theranos for five years.
> retired U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, explaining why he signed up last fall as another of Theranos’s strikingly illustrious outside directors. Mattis had stepped down just months earlier as commander of the U.S. Central Command–the chief of U.S. military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia
"What an odd cast for a startup board. I wonder what connects all these people, other than all being high-profile."
Government relations. Influence with policymakers and thought leaders. Makes total sense for a med-tech company. This is an industry where "non-market factors" (government regulation, threat of competitive lobbying or lawsuits by incumbents, etc.) play an enormous role. If I were starting a med-tech company that threatens a $60B+ industry with hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying efforts every year, I'd love to have a board featuring policy elites, ex-government officials, and a legendary trial lawyer who's argued successfully in front of the Supreme Court on multiple occasions.
The only person she's missing here is Bill Gates. (And it would be quite interesting to see him and Boies on the same side after all these years.)
"Interesting" meaning it would be interesting to see them in a room together. Meaning fun.
I'm not suggesting Boies was anything but neutral in the case against MSFT. Maybe reading too much from my "on the same side" comment, or else maybe I phrased that too ambiguously.
Her father. Holmes comes from a very wealthy and prominent family. Her father, Christian Holmes IV, has had many high ranking jobs in government. I'm assuming the board was built from his numerous government and family wealth connections.
Coming from wealth doesn't hurt but somehow the articles always leave that bit out ...
It's always left out, and this I will get bashed again for
agreeing. I think what she is doing is great. I sometimes
think doctors prescribe medication and just hope for the best? Actually, they do just hope for the best! I know they
shy away from any technology that could be used againt them
in a malpractice suit. As, to getting better if you are sick--just believing you will get better is so important.
Yes, follow doctors orders, and believe you will get better.
This effect, called the Placebo Effect is too often left out. I've seen people run to the Internet when they are diagnosed with a disease--and they just get worse. Back on topic--I hope her company helps patients, and brings down
the cost of medicine, and not another investment story?
Seems rather sad state of our Patent system here in the US where a 19 year old with no prior technical background, who was a Chemical Engineering student, a sophomore no less (meaning barely finished or finishing General Ed. requirements and just starting Major courses), can write and file for a highly-technical patent involving radios, sensors, embedded devices, and the like.
> And we could put a cellphone chip on it, and it could telemeter out to the doctor or the patient what was going on.
It's very doubtful she understood how any of that works, or would work in her product/patent.
Underlying story seems it's absurd this was patent-able.
I think you're underestimating her intelligence and capabilities. Clearly she had the background and the initiative. There are super smart and dedicated people out there. She sounds like one of them.
Beyond that, I'm not sure if the patent is absurd or not...but I definitely don't think its absurd for a 19 year old woman to write up and be awarded a patent.
No, I was meaning I find it highly unlikely she understood or could actually implement the technology behind her patent.
A 19 year old, no matter how smart, is not likely to have a thorough enough background to understand all of the related technologies involved in this patent. This is a medical device, and has to be "done right", or people can be injured or worse. I don't expect even a top-tier CS student could pull it off.
I'm not attempting to discredit her intelligence, just pointing out she seems to have been/is an "idea guy". We've all run into "idea guys", they'll pitch a great idea with all this elaborate stuff, but then can't execute on it without outside help. Perhaps she got help, who knows?
A patent is, more-or-less, a mere idea (which is absurd in it's own right, ideas should not be patentable imho). So, you are right, it's not "absurd for a 19 year old [gender-is-regardless] to write up and be awarded a patent", it's absurd it was patentable in the first place.
Back in 1963, I was tutored in calculus by a 15-year old who won that year's Science Talent Search for his research in nuclear magnetic resonance. He had completed essentially all of undergrad math and physics. I think you have a badly warped view of what is possible for smart people, whatever age.
No, I think there's a reason she recruited a professor in that industry who had well over 30 years of experience.
That doesn't detract from her intelligence, but I think it's safe to say she would have simply done it herself if she could have.
I think simply describing her as an "idea person" is also missing the mark, but so are you. She isn't a magician, she's just a person.
And considering she was 19 and in a normal college curriculum, it's very likely her talent is not in being super smart, but in being able to come at a problem sideways.
Depends on how motivated the 19 year old was, and how much freedom they had to focus on what was important to them.
By the age of 14 or 15, most intelligent and motivated people have enough education to start learning advanced processes and systems. Say you start at 14, if you are focussed, by the time you are 19, you will have had 12,000+ hours of opportunity to develop expertise in your field. And Ms. Holmes sounds very capable (Learned Mandarin in her spare time as a teenager, as a result spent a summer at the Genome Institute in Singapore,etc, etc,...)
I would expect that there is a significant (if not excessively large) population of 19 year olds out there that can not only invent, and understand, but also design, and prototype advanced technological platforms of the same complexity identified in this patent.
We had a 13 year old in my Computing Science Undergraduate course at SFU who just absorbed and aced every math course he encountered, zero effort at homework or note taking.
Some people are capable of great accomplishments at a very young age, and strictly speaking, 19 is not particularly young.
> Ms. Holmes sounds very capable (Learned Mandarin in her spare time as a teenager, as a result spent a summer at the Genome Institute in Singapore,etc, etc,...)
Actually, that anecdote made it evident that the reporter clearly didn't do his research. If he had, he would have known that one of Singapore's draws since its inception has been its English fluency. This is particularly true in its white collar/STEM companies and research institutes.
Moreover, many of Singapore's ethnic Chinese are non-native Mandarin speakers, being of Southern Chinese descent. They would almost certainly feel more comfortable conversing in English than in Mandarin, particularly if they are highly educated.
I wonder if the Genome Institute has a lot of Chinese Nationals? But yes, agreed - I've been in Singapore for 14+ Months, and have never run into a White Collar worker who could not speak fluent english.
Written English is hit and miss, but spoken english is definitely the Universal common language for business in Singapore.
Since there's been so much arguing back and forth about this patent and its legitimacy and what it says about the state of the US patent system, I thought it might be a little useful to post a link to the patent in question:
I filed a patent at age 16; there are no laws governing how old you must be to file, and rightfully so.
While you may stereotype young people as being unready to write and file patents--and perhaps many are--at least some have developed the right skills and technical knowledge to do so.
Judge the patents on their own merits, not their authors.
Seems like a rather sad state of Hacker News when there is so much doubt heaped on a woman's technical ability just because of her age, and the fact she was unlikely to have completed the relevant formal education.
There is rarely an invention 101. Many people can teach themselves.
I think I should make it clear -- this is not a gender issue. Let's stop trying to make it one.
It, perhaps, is a age issue, sure. I have my doubts that an 19 year old chemical engineering student would have enough technical background to implement: radios, embedded systems, various sensors, medical analysis algorithms, database usage, notifications systems, knowledge of cellular technology, agreements with hospitals and insurance companies, etc.
However, here in the US, a patent is more-or-less just an idea -- meaning, one can think-up something, and patent it. That is valid.
My thoughts are, the article was obviously a puffy PR piece, designed to make the company look good. I believe she was an "idea guy" and was awarded a patent for that idea, then likely brought in outside help to implement it... which is very very common.
Well, you'd be mistaken. There are people who learn 3, heck, even 10 times faster than your standard bright university student, in large part because they needn't wait for formal instruction. You have probably learned at this pace on certain topics.
Such people can defy the standardized logic of what's possible by a certain age.
For example, Howard Hughes:
Showing great aptitude in engineering at an early age, Hughes, Jr. built Houston's first "wireless" or radio transmitter when he was 11 years old.[5] He went on to be one of the first licensed ham radio operators in Houston, having the assigned callsign, W5CY (originally 5CY). [6] At 12, Hughes was photographed in the local newspaper, identified as being the first boy in Houston to have a "motorized" bicycle, which he had built himself from parts taken from his father's steam engine.[7] He was an indifferent student with a liking for mathematics, flying, and things mechanical, taking his first flying lesson at 14 and later auditing math and aeronautical engineering courses at Caltech.[5][7]
Philo T. Farnsworth:
Farnsworth excelled in chemistry and physics at Rigby High School. He asked his high school science teacher, Justin Tolman, for advice about an electronic television system he was contemplating. He provided the teacher with sketches and diagrams covering several blackboards to show how it might be accomplished electronically. He asked his teacher if he should go ahead with his ideas, and he was encouraged to do so.[13] One of the drawings he did on a blackboard for his chemistry teacher was recalled and reproduced for a patent interference case between Farnsworth and Radio Corporation of America (RCA).[14]
Yes, these people exist in the population. I'm inclined in most instances, this included, to "bet the field" when such an intelligence is claimed to be presented. I find it more likely that she is an "idea person" than a modern Farnsworth simply because the former is only about 10,000x more likely (perhaps 1,000x more likely if you get all Bayesian on me).
But fortunately for all of us my opinion, and that of the person you responded to, are irrelevant and only good for intellectual quibbling. We'll see what becomes of this company and CEO.
With "resources" and "consultants, work for hire" anyone with funds can write a pretty decent patent application and drive it through the system.
When you file a patent application you can say it's pending, raise funds on it, get yourself a decent engineer, and file a continuation later with more "meat".
> Seems rather sad state of our Patent system here in the US where a 19 year old with no prior technical background, who was a Chemical Engineering student, a sophomore no less (meaning barely finished or finishing General Ed. requirements and just starting Major courses), can write and file for a highly-technical patent involving radios, sensors, embedded devices, and the like.
> It's very doubtful she understood how any of that works, or would work in her product/patent.
I'm not quite sure if I understand you right, do you mean to suggest she should not be able to apply for patents because she's young or because she's a woman or both?
I'm really not sure why you are attempting to make this a gender issue.
If you re-read my comment, gender is not even approached.
To summarize my post - I was making a statement regarding how absurd (imho) it is that someone can patent something they are not technically capable of even implementing. It is patentable because here in the US, patents are really just "ideas", so you don't have to actually implement the patent, just think it up. I doubt a 19 year old sophomore chemical engineering student would have the technical background to actually implement this patent... alluding to, she was just another "idea guy".
You should not be questioning the patent based on the person but on the contents of the patent. I know some 19 year olds that would absolutely astound you with what they are capable of. One of the things this website has taught me is to completely overlook the age factor.
To implement something described in the article, it requires experience, not intelligence, nor age.
It's the experience that is in question. There is a lot of radically different and unique technologies that would be required to be mastered in order to implement a medical device such as this, safely and reliably. Not to mention extreme business prowess to wiggle ones way into a tightly guarded community such as the medical industry.
(It's likely she brought in outside help to do the actual implementation, which is normal, other commenters have noted that she came from a family with great means, which would extend her reach by a great margin).
Originally, I was commenting on it being absurd that in the US, one can patent an idea that one has no clue how to actually implement/build. Perhaps that was not the case here (although it seems to be), but unfortunately that is the case for an awful lot of patents here in the states.
Anyone can think something up -- but to actually do it... that's a whole different beast.
> To implement something described in the article, it requires experience, not intelligence, nor age.
Well, there are people out there who have plenty of experience. People who have, between them, collectively hundreds of years of experience in the relevant fields. So why haven't they been able to do what she has?
Maybe because it was never really about experience, but about the unique combination of smarts, guts and drive that she has?
They are all very strategic choices. Boies in order to protect the company from litigious incumbents, generals to help secure government contracts, and senators to help protect against legislative moves.
> with the exception of Frist a quick read shows no connection to healthcare
Well, there's also Shultz, who was "a director at biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences," according to this article.
But you're right that those people are mainly on the board for their influence in Washington. The importance of that when taking on an entrenched and heavily regulated industry can't be overstated.
Cynical interpretation: well-funded med-tech company hires an incredibly well-connected board and presumably a great PR firm, and lands an epic puff piece in Fortune.
Uncynical interpretation: well-funded med-tech company quietly grows to become an inspiring success, thanks to game-changing technology and a brilliant founder.
I see both of these interpretations as compatible. In fact, #1 can often follow from #2. In either or both cases, this seems like the kind of company we should root for: using new approaches to technology to solve big problems. As another commenter in this thread put it: this is a lot more than just "Yo."
I had a smile on my face while reading this article. Regardless of the PR behind the article, it's certainly refreshing to see a startup like this. I'm rooting for them. Medtech needs game changing technologies!
Pretty clear, they are getting significant traction in a market dominated by 'old school' companies and players. Perhaps their PR department wanted to get out front with the narrative :-). Having friends that work around the FDA's influence it is a very politicized space. She clearly built her board such that she could counter those threats.
Ah, the FDA, that makes sense. There's a certain hallucinogenic quality to the prose that, when combined with the Kissenger namedrop, made me kinda nervous. I guess that's just because I don't generally read fortune magazine.
Wild guess? Someone at DOD or DOS has a simulation that really has them spooked and wants to get civilian testing coverage in place fast, so they've thrown support behind Holmes who has a way to do it. Zombie jokes aside, it's really a pretty reasonable first step for pandemic resilience.
Or Holmes is an alien who wants to inject everyone with vegan mind control spiders.
Either way it's likely good for humanity in the long run.
> Someone at DOD or DOS has a simulation that really has them spooked and wants to get civilian testing coverage
NORTHCOM maybe (they're the geographic combatant commander in charge of DSCA planning for pandemic influenza). But despite the horror show portrayed about the military in all the zombie/pandemic movies, the military wants badly to avoid anything to do with this mission at all, so it wouldn't surprise me if they're trying to get contractors to do the heavy lifting for response planning.
Holmes had then just spent the summer working in a lab at the Genome Institute in Singapore, a post she had been able to fill thanks to having learned Mandarin in her spare hours as a Houston teenager.
Everyone knows that English is spoken in Singapore, right? I'm not saying Mandarin wouldn't look good on a resume, but very few Singaporeans with the education to work in that facility would not also be fluent in the international language of science. Even if her work took place in community clinics, Mandarin wouldn't have been as helpful as e.g. Hokkien.
EDIT: Since it's kind of lame that such a nitpick is still at the top, I'd like to address this also:
Its advances relate to "optimizing the chemistry" and "leveraging software" to permit those conventional methods to work with tiny sample volumes.
IANABiochemist, but they're talking about statistical methods here, right? My intuition is that a particular test performed at "nano"-scale might not be very accurate, but that a series of such tests could be as accurate as required.
I immediately picked up on that as well. Along with the whole "selling C++ compilers to Chinese universities in the late 90s" thing, it makes the article seem rather poorly researched and overly adulatory.
No. I keep my laowai b*tching limited to foreigner bar nights. But if anyone ever wants to know something about living here, they can contact me by email.
Can someone help me on the technical aspects of the blood tests they've developed?
The premise appears to be that they take extremely small samples ("25 to 50 microliters") and run lots of tests ("as many as 70 different tests from a single draw") using "the same fundamental chemical methods".
This compares with standard blood tests which require 2 orders of magnitude more blood ("numerous tubes of blood, each containing 3,000- to 5,000-microliter samples").
How does one produce reliable output with the same sensitivity/specificity using the same chemistry with so much less blood? I find it hard to believe that the existing lab procedures left that much efficiency on the table...
Can someone help me on the technical aspects of the blood tests they've developed?
On the specifics, I'm afraid nobody can for now. They have refused to peer-review their protocols and validation data, so their assays are essentially a black box. So far, incredibly, they have managed to get away with this thanks to a glaring regulatory loophole (as the article explains); but sooner or later they'll have to open up if they want their assays to be taken seriously by the medical community.
In broader terms, however, there's been a lot of recent work in the well-established microfluidics [1] literature on whole-blood assays [2], so that can give you a good guess about how they go about their implementation: most likely some form of "lab-on-a-disk" centrifugation for plasma separation and subsequent transport to separate microfluidic optical chambers preloaded with colorimetric reagents for readout, using perhaps a digital camera and some non-kosher/black-boxy form of curve-fitting DSP to increase "sensitivity".
In all I'm very skeptical until they open up and provide peer-reviewed validation data for their assays. There are already several companies doing patented blood microfluidics like Abaxis [3] with peer-reviewed validation, and the enabling technologies have been out in the open in the literature for years, if not decades; so the whole "we are doing a super duper secret awesome thing we can't tell you anything about" sounds rather D-Wavey and fishy to me.
It's not fishy, it's just a business strategy rather than a tech strategy.
They have a couple microfluidics assays that are profitable and they suspect these might be patent encumbered (even beyond the troll that they have already brought into the fold by giving him a board position.). Secrecy buys them two things:
1. Their competitors won't know what their loss leaders are. If assays A,B, and C have been optimized to profitability but D and E are still loss leaders, a competitor could use that knowledge by subsidizing demand for D and E (e.g. by undercutting them and forwarding the assay work, whereby the competitor spends $1 to force them to spend $10).
2. Patent trolls (are they really trolls if they spent money to develop the technology and make a product based on it?) won't know what to sue them for.
Wouldn't it be fairly easy to determine their FP/FN figures just by sending them lots of blood samples with known composition? If it's a black box, use black-box testing methods.
The technology has already been developed and proven in an academic setting. It's mature enough that you can find cheap textbooks for it. Microfluidic assays (which can be combined, like circuits, on a silicon chip) for every conceivable metric of interest have been developed, debugged, and sold to incumbent diagnostics companies. It was only a matter of time before someone integrated them, but the "usual suspects" were tripped up by market kinetics:
No academic group has been sufficiently capitalized to pursue an "Integrate All The Assays" (IATA) project. A lab typically pursues 2 or 3 assays at a time, which they will often integrate into a "µTAS" which is academic slang for IATA but should get its own term because typical µTASs measure 2 or 3 things which is far below the potential of the technology (what I'm terming "IATA").
Industrial groups that were in a position to go IATA already had hard-won silos in the payola+bundling ridden rat's nest of the medical supply industry. They wanted to keep those (payola+bundling = low competition and high margins) and they didn't want to fight the war-on-many-fronts that would arise if they tried to invade everyone else's silos at once. The big risk is that their competitors in every silo could undercut/outmaneuver them in individual silos faster than they could weave a political network to unify purchasing across silos.
Well, now someone has figured out how to do just that. Strategy: lots of money, lots of connections, and a killer entry strategy. It's all in the execution, as always.
Two interesting questions to keep in mind as this plays out:
1. Now that someone has gone IATA, will the medical device supply industry become truly competitive again? I think there's a nonzero chance of that happening. That would be a dream come true for consumers and medtech startups alike.
2. How much of the proceeds will filter back to the people who actually developed the technology? Obviously the answer will be "a teeny tiny fraction," but the amount in absolute terms will be an important indicator (to me, personally, and I suspect others) as to how well the patent system works in this sector. Will it be like the software sector (patents discourage implementation AND don't encourage innovation) or will it be like the drug sector (patents function more or less as they were intended albeit with the caveat that a lion's share of the proceeds flows, as it always does, to capital)?
FTA, it seems she's front-running some approvals requirements and the sales / payola cycle by running a testing lab as well as developing the tests.
To IT people, this is counterintuitive. You don't vertically integrate, you go for a horizontal slice. Intel won by making chips, not making whole systems (like IBM did).
I guess vertical integration might make more sense in healthcare though, for regulatory and market reasons. I guess the market might be a bit more like IBM renting out mainframes than Intel selling CPU to OEMs. Also, making the tests cheaper (which is the main thing she's doing) might be unattractive to labs, if cost-plus pricing is popular - existing providers might not want to cut their prices.
The only thing I can think of was that the Chinese had some new architecture with no compiler out there for it. But if they had their own architecture they could surely build their own compiler..
And I bet if you showed this article to someone with a background in the diagnostics industries Theranos is trying to disrupt, they would find all kinds of fishy aspects to those parts of the story as well.
So no one has mentioned this yet, but this article is actually the Fortune cover story.
And I think very much deserved, not for most of the details mentioned in the article, but because of their pricing page: http://www.theranos.com/test-menu -- it's freaking cheap.
It's almost absurdly cheap. If your health insurance doesn't cover your lab tests, then it's probably cheaper to travel to their testing centers in Arizona, get tested and go back home than go to a medical lab near you and pay out of pocket.
On another note, I wonder why all except one of their testing centers are in and around Phoenix?
The link isn't working for me - Chrome on Windows. Edit: nevermind, Ghostery blocked everything except the navbar.
In any case, I'm pulling for Theranos to be successful. I've had to have a lot of blood work done recently and I've been underwhelmed by every medical lab so far. If Theranos can use a smaller blood sample AND run more tests with it, then I can't wait to be a customer.
As a fellow health-tech entrepreneur, it's refreshing to see the business press reporting on something more than just "Yo." I hope this kind of publicity continues. The industry needs it.
So what happened to the original idea? The patch that takes blood measurements while administering a drug? I can see how the current business is an extension of that original idea, but the article never states what became of the original. Did it die in the FDA approval process?
There have been hints and whispers of Theranos here at HN for a while, here at least is more information about it, puff piece or no.
The board is quite impressive; I suspect they have gotten at least some DoD money, i.e. DARPA, through which perhaps some of those connections were made...
The CEO is definitely out for blood, and her employees apparently aren't exempt...
Here's some more information about Theranos... I interviewed with these guys recently. One of the things the interviewer stressed is that the programmers there typically work 60-hour weeks, and would I be okay with that. He said he was very proud of the fact that they used to work 80-hour weeks but had gotten it down to about 60. I passed on them just for this one reason...
The interview coding challenges were fairly well-designed and somewhat fun to do, though.
I was somewhat recently contacted for an interview, and the interviewer mentioned 45-55 hour work weeks, but other than that, the company seemed like it would be a decent company to work for. The screening process is somewhat more hardcore than others, but that can be a good thing.
What an amazing story. Best read of the entire week. It's 20 minutes well spent.
A look at their website (and the profiles they're hiring for) gives a clear idea of where she is going. You don't need iOS/Android developers, or ASIC/FPGA designers, or hardware and mechanical engineers, to support Walgreen's Wellness centers.
She's clearly going after the last mile. Blood tests for the masses. In your phone. No need for prescriptions, or visits to Walgreens.
This is way bigger than a $90 billion dollars blood test industry.
What the company does sounds great. Maybe I skimmed through it too quickly but it starts out talking a lot about patches that measure the response to drugs. But then the company seems to just be doing blood tests quickly and cheaply. There was a pivot in there somewhere, right? Hard to tell with all the fluff around it.
The article also mentions how they do it is trade secret but I'm curious what the innovations are here. They throw some things out there though, like bypassing FDA hurdles and shrinking equipment and blood sample size down. It sounds like they're just streamlining a sleepy, well entrenched industry? A noble endeavor but the juicy details would be nice if we could get them.
Some day I hope that we can get these tests small and cheap enough that they could be purchased OTC and run easily and frequently at home. Collect a few hundred samples points while you check your weight in the morning and ship the data off to Amazon for data mining. It would wipe out surprise "I've had diabetes for the last 10 years and didn't realize it" diagnosis and that's a huge, huge win. Not to mention what the QS crowd would do with it.
Not sure what to make of that bit about the restaurant. If she's really testing her blood after every meal, then I don't see how she could miss the impact her veggie, carb, low-protein, no-fat diet.
Well, cheaper and easier testing is great for everyone, particular in environments that can't run expensive fully equipped pathology laboratories eg rural areas, developing nations, refugee camps etc.
But at the end of the day, we need better tests, not better ways of testing. Looking through their test menu, it's the same old diagnostic blood tests we've been using for the last 30 or even 50 years. Hopefully there is something revolutionary behind the hype. I don't think it will be consumerization - none of those listed tests is going to help early detection of anything by getting yourself tested at Walgreens while you're buying toothpaste. Similarly, most of the tests are only useful when applied in a well fleshed out diagnostic process that involves collecting data about symptoms and medical history to generate a prior probability of the disease. Otherwise the false positive rate is high, and the false negative rate difficult to deal with. The utility of serial monitoring as a marker of health is also far from proven, but is an interesting idea. At the moment though, if you go to your doctor and say your homocysteine levels are fluctuating strangely, they won't have a clue what to do about it...
I would also add that proving that a test can be used to detect a disease early, and that early detection leads to a measurable improvement in disease outcomes takes a very long time, a lot of patients and a lot of money. So if they have made some great advance in microfluidic chemoproteomics that can actually detect the early traces of a disease process then that would be amazing, but one must remain skeptical.
Wow, what a story. They sound like they're killing it, the founder's motivation is admirable, and she's making a positive dent in the world. I hope they succeed.
Loved this quote from her professor: “To me, I wish I wasn’t 70 years old. I wish I was her age and could be in on this. Because this is going to be a long, exciting, fascinating, exhilarating ride.”
I had to delete the header to be able to read the article. The constantly changing/flashing text just a couple of cm higher to where my eyes are focusing to read the article is very annoying.
> Her father, Christian Holmes IV, has devoted most of his life to public-minded government service–disaster relief in Africa, international development projects in China, environmental work in this country–and is currently the global water coordinator for the U.S. Agency for International Development. He met Elizabeth’s mother, Noel, on Capitol Hill, where she worked as a congressional committee staffer.
she definitely learnt a lot from her parents. At least how to navigate politically charged [mine]fields
Robertson recounts. “And I kind of kicked myself. I’d consulted in this area for 30 years, but I’d never said, here we make all these gizmos that measure, and all these systems that deliver, but I never brought the two together.”
> Though Theranos is largely unknown even in Silicon Valley, that is about to change.
> Precisely how Theranos accomplishes all these amazing feats is a trade secret.
> The analyzers look like large desktop computer towers. Holmes declines to explain how they work, or even allow them to be photographed, citing the need to protect trade secrets. The company manufactures them at an unmarked facility I toured in a research park across the South Bay from Palo Alto, in Newark, Calif.
> the single most accomplished board in U.S. corporate history. It includes former U.S. Secretary of State, Treasury, and Labor George Shultz; former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry; former Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger; and former U.S. Senators Sam Nunn and Bill Frist
> In a rare if not unprecedented rout this past March, the patent holders unconditionally surrendered midtrial, stipulating to the invalidity of their own patent. As a kicker they agreed–though the presiding judge would have been powerless to order such a thing himself–to bring no additional patent suits against Theranos for five years.
> retired U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, explaining why he signed up last fall as another of Theranos’s strikingly illustrious outside directors. Mattis had stepped down just months earlier as commander of the U.S. Central Command–the chief of U.S. military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia
... zombie ... apocalypse