Re:Subprime ‘unicorns’ that do not look a billion dollars
by akiselev on Saturday October 17, 2015 @02:44PM
(#10405536)
Theranos definitely has an uphill battle against the ubiquity and cost efficiency of offsite testing labs but their technology is significantly different because it is an onsite test with a tiny amount of blood.
The infrastructure to support the kind of experience you're used to at Lab Corporation or Quest Diagnostics does not exist in much of the world. With the ubiquity of electricity and wireless broadband, a charity like Doctors Without Borders or Red Cross can drop a Theranos test device in a developing country and only have to worry about delivery of consumables to the location instead of shipping samples out, which requires a reliable postal infrastructure instead of a once a month delivery by airplane, boat, train, truck, or rickshaw for that matter.
I'm excited by Theranos' technology because the FDA has strict limits on how much blood you can draw from patients during a clinical trial. As our therapeutics get more and more complicated, we'll need a lot more data but the FDA will not raise this limit much, if at all, in the future. This is a known issue that you have to design around when running clinical trials, especially if you're developing something like a cancer cocktail where you might be looking for half a dozen metabolites and intermediary molecules in extremely low concentrations that each need a vial of blood. This isn't Theranos' target market (intermediaries/metabolites can be much harder to design tests for) but their tech's ability to test onsite with a tiny amount of blood might allow them to move into this market.
The infrastructure to support the kind of experience you're used to at Lab Corporation or Quest Diagnostics does not exist in much of the world. With the ubiquity of electricity and wireless broadband, a charity like Doctors Without Borders or Red Cross can drop a Theranos test device in a developing country and only have to worry about delivery of consumables to the location instead of shipping samples out, which requires a reliable postal infrastructure instead of a once a month delivery by airplane, boat, train, truck, or rickshaw for that matter.
I'm excited by Theranos' technology because the FDA has strict limits on how much blood you can draw from patients during a clinical trial. As our therapeutics get more and more complicated, we'll need a lot more data but the FDA will not raise this limit much, if at all, in the future. This is a known issue that you have to design around when running clinical trials, especially if you're developing something like a cancer cocktail where you might be looking for half a dozen metabolites and intermediary molecules in extremely low concentrations that each need a vial of blood. This isn't Theranos' target market (intermediaries/metabolites can be much harder to design tests for) but their tech's ability to test onsite with a tiny amount of blood might allow them to move into this market.