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The main website mentions something about the "minilab", here's video which shows the various components housed inside the Theranos minilab: https://www.youtube
by pen2l 9y ago
The main website mentions something about the "minilab", here's video which shows the various components housed inside the Theranos minilab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWflFijPEpc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWflFijPEpc
A material handling robot, a camera, a centrifuge, a cytometer, etc etc.... it's like a really neat Swiss army toy that would probably be great in the hands of researchers, provided that this hardware has a somewhat open API. Presuming that it more or less works, it's kind of cool, and lots of labs (both proper medical and research labs) would probably be interested in buying such a thing and would gladly pay a good few thousand bucks for it.
- dbcooper 9y agoIt looks like a bunch of stuff put inside a box ... in a render. It doesn't look like any development beyond "we need to show a product idea" went into it. Nobody will ever buy anything from them. Nobody should.
- pen2l 9y agoReally? Does it really seriously look like a render? As it happens _I_ sometimes create renders for my 9-5 of medical equipment (in solidworks and c4d), these Theranos minilab images look like photographs to me, not renders. > Nobody will ever buy anything from them. Nobody should. Oh, trust me, a lot of people will buy things like minilab if it's marketed well, there's a lot of money for these things. A common price for any medical research hardware of the serious kind is tens of thousands (my lab got a confocal microscope only recently for $200k; our sister lab bought a diamond turning machine for about 2 million to create glass lens).
- dbcooper 9y agoI design custom instruments for startups and labs. No one will buy anything related to Theranos. No one wants a bunch of random parts in a custom box. Why the hell would anyone put a centrifuge or a thermocycler adjacent to an expensive precision instrument like a flow cytometer?
- foobarian 9y agoWow. How can it possibly be worth $2M to make glass lenses? Is this for eyeglasses?
- pen2l 9y agoMaking lens for optical experiment setups, with machines like these: http://www.nanotechsys.com/ http://www.nanotechsys.com/
- phonon 9y ago> would gladly pay a good few thousand bucks for it. A minilab will cost way more than that...just the centrifuge component cost is in the thousands. A lab already has this type of equipment...the expected use is for point of care...but which doctor's office will want to spend $50k++ (plus ongoing reagent costs etc.) for results that will be less accurate than from a regular lab? So maybe military usage? In any case, they have not released any update at all on it for a year.
- specialp 9y agoI used to work selling and maintaining instruments primarily to physician's offices. They were all 50k+. It depends on the tests being run, and what type of insurances the patients have. If they have good insurance that doesn't require the blood sent out to Quest or other mega lab company, they can make decent money on specialty chemistry tests. And yes, these doctors would order absolutely everything they can bill for as it was going in their pocket. Homocystine, and Vitamin D are 2 high reimbursement tests they liked a lot. However as I always said about Theranos they have no technology that could possibly work for a wide variety of analytes, and this is already a very competitive market in both equipment and labs. They still don't have a chance. I have no idea how people were so fooled by this. A 40+ billion dollar long existing industry that relies on heavily regulated hard science is not going to be disrupted by a college dropout.