Re:U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth ...
by JumpCrisscross on Friday June 15, 2018 @05:31PM
(#17323742)
Do you believe Theranos could have beee successful company with less delusional management? (Honest question for a HN colleague for whom I have tremendous respect.)
Re:U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth ...
by tptacek on Friday June 15, 2018 @05:39PM
(#17323823)
I don't know anything about this space; all I know comes from Carreyrou's book. Somewhere towards the middle, one of his sources observes that it's particularly hard to get a good sample from a finger stick --- something about damaged blood cells --- and you can find recent journal articles online suggesting that finger stick samples are inherently a lot less reliable than venous draws.
So, I sort of doubt it.
Re:U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth ...
by URSpider94 on Friday June 15, 2018 @07:41PM
(#17324714)
Not an expert in this field, but it seems like they could have pivoted to do a smaller sub-set of blood tests, like the immunoassays. Part of the failure was their insistence that they were going to do ALL blood tests through a finger stick. Once they had raised tens of millions of dollars based on taking the entire market, it was probably too late to de-scope the vision without losing their investors.
Re:U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth ...
by jcranmer on Friday June 15, 2018 @05:52PM
(#17323928)
Could they have successfully run tests on smaller sample sizes? Possibly, but the target market size is small (needing less blood isn't particularly advantageous unless you're dealing with children or babies without much blood in the first place).
The finger-prick-testing was always very likely to fail; the biology just doesn't work out in your favor. However, getting finger-pricks working was the entire basis of their strategy, not the "test using less blood" idea.
Re:U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth ...
by dbt00 on Friday June 15, 2018 @05:50PM
(#17323916)
Not a domain expert, but as I recall most of the things they want to test for aren't present at a sufficient level in the blood stream to get a statistically significant sample from a few drops.
Blood sugar is a relatively high percentage of your blood stream, which is why strip-based glucose monitors work.
Re:U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth ...
by JauntTrooper on Friday June 15, 2018 @05:39PM
(#17323822)
I’ve never seen any evidence the underlying tech ever actually worked.
The Edison was intended to run a full panel of blood tests, both chemical and immunological assays, off a finger stick of blood. It was also intended to allow Theranos to function as its own lab.
The Minilab was intended to run a full panel of blood tests I believe off a larger venous sample, and was expected to be marketed to existing labs (at this point, Theranos had been forbidden from operating its own labs).
In its own labs, Theranos made minimal use of the Edison, which was unreliable and supported only a few tests. Rather, they're accused of taking finger-stick draws, diluting them, and then feeding them into hacked-up adapters for COTS lab machines.