Not quite. Theranos was stating that they were capable of doing what was impossible prior. The real issue with Theranos was physics. A single drop of blood is simply not a large enough sample for them to do all the testing they claimed. As in, impossible with today's tech and in the near future.

These folks are just stating that, "so far, this looks promising".

At least, thats my read. YMMV.

It is important to point out that what they claimed to do is not technically impossible actually. They just didn't do it, and lied about it. That was the real problem.

It's very unfortunate, because it is technically possible, just very difficult to achieve, even in academia (so it won't be done first in industry).

This was the absolute worst part of Theranos, is that they deter others from trying to make headway in the space at all.

I don't believe they could run a battery of 81+ tests on a drop of blood. There simply isn't enough there. Why do you think they take tubes of blood for testing, currently?

The issue is concentrations and the presence of them in sufficient amounts to be detected reliably and consistently.

edit: typo.. words are hard.

It's because that's what the equipment is designed to use, and yes it provides more reliable results with the current technology. Much of the equipment used in healthcare relies on very old technology. This certainly does not mean it cannot be improved to work with less amount of material.

There are hand held sequencers for your phone now (minIon) that are very cheap and work. There are also large multimillion dollar bench top machines on the same technology from nanopore. Both are very new technology compared to what we used in early 2000s, and offer various different features and certainties from the analysis.

However, it is foolish to say that the minIon is impossible. It works. It's just less resolute than other systems.

This is true for many systems which people cry "Theranos" about. Their issue was lying. That was the problem.

Less resolute works in some cases and that was never at issue. The problem is, less resolute doesn't work for some things and when the sample size is a drop of blood, we're talking insanely small, as in impossible, sample size for some tests.

Low concentrations will NOT be reliably detected. That's part of why such a comparatively large sample is taken when you go for the traditional testing.

I'm not even going into the simple fact that once chems are introduced into the sample to generate reactions, the sample can't continue to be used.

Exactly how many times do you think we can split a single drop of blood?

Edit: good talk, even if we disagree. :)

No, not at all. Polar opposites.

Theranos was actual lies. TFA is just being honest about a low sample size.

If somebody claims: our device "accurately tests", and we discover later that "In fact the tests hadn't been done still" (at a meaningful way), It should be taken as a red flag. Specially when it came in the same package with "to make lots of tests would be really cheap" (but for some reason they didn't tried it).

Maybe be a great, honest work, brilliant step?. Yes.

But please don't claim that your model is reproducible if you didn't ever tried seriously to reproduce it first. What if the results are just a random effect?. What if the test says just positive most of the time? The test negative response has been tested in a control group of 4 people? This is 20 bucks well spent.

--At this moment-- isn't different than other thousand projects that seemed too good to be true, toke the money and soon vanished. I hope to be wrong.

> didn't ever tried seriously to reproduce it first

Maybe they found something worth testing and just need more funding to actually do the tests?

I have no problem with early free speech about "I found something interesting" as long as you're honest about the sample size and don't misrepresent it.

Without a larger n you can't really tell what the fp rate is and that means that the accuracy figure isn't very useful. If accuracy holds in light of a false positive rate that is much lower than other tests then this may well be very useful. But you can not conclude that at all based on the evidence presented.