2 ms·
If you know enough biology, the conceit that they could do so many of these tests with a fingerstick vs. a venous blood draw was highly questionable from the st
by hga 11y ago
If you know enough biology, the conceit that they could do so many of these tests with a fingerstick vs. a venous blood draw was highly questionable from the start.
Sure, they could in theory prove that basic intuition wrong, but they didn't in any way in the dozen years since their founding, and at last count were doing only one of their tests with a fingerstick. The 2nd section of the article covers this with thorough, accurate, and concise prose.
And then we learned about their being extremely sloppy in running one of their conventional blood labs, which is a very well establishing sort of thing nowadays (heck, using machines in blood labs goes back to the '50s). The sort of thing that is justly worth $10,000/day fines.
Ah, one detail here is that this is not what I'd call a "technology" problem, it's as much a "science" problem, and those can be much less tractable.
If you want to label their troubles as being with communications, it seems hard justify after trying and failing for 12 years. And not accepting the norms of the science community, see again that 2nd section, and now the norms of the lab testing regulatory community. There's reasons these two communities have their cultures, and if you want to "disrupt" them, you should at least understand and appreciate them, and why they exist as they do.
As for "criminal-illegal conduct", it's starting to have the whiff of a Ponzi scheme, as their own technology appears to utterly fail in both the scientific and regulatory domains, and they spend a lot more than they're charging to run their tests, not that at this point they're likely to attract any more investment. If the financial regulators choose to push it, it looks like they could make a case for raising funds or spending that money on false pretenses, at which point the membership of the board might come in very handy. (The former structure and huge size (12), though, speak of a CEO dominated board, not one that would provide the company with useful guidance).