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Blood-Testing Firm Theranos to Dissolve

• ChuckMcM 8y ago
  And poof goes the unicorn. Also enjoyed Bad Blood its really well done.
• ryan-allen 8y ago
  Paywall free link http://archive.is/gEktW http://archive.is/gEktW
  • godzillabrennus 8y ago
    Outline is more optimized: https://outline.com/kRrnNH https://outline.com/kRrnNH
    • Operyl 8y ago
      The Outline is missing some of the text it looks like? The text "according to a shareholder email. Theranos" is nowhere to be seen in the outline link.
  • phonon 8y ago
    http://archive.is/QVl7r http://archive.is/QVl7r
• kornish 8y ago
  Fitting that this article is posted by John Carreyrou.
  • deleted 8y ago
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  • unmole 8y ago
    I guess it just makes sense for him to handle all of WSJ's Theranos coverage.
  • kregasaurusrex 8y ago
    Part of me is disappointed that the tech Theranos had promised never amounted to anything game-changing; but the other especially enjoys Carreyrou's in-depth investigative reporting of the subject.
• godzillabrennus 8y ago
  They basically sold the patents their investors paid for when they took out the last loan and didn’t meet the requirements to keep getting funded. It seems that the only question remaining is how long Elizabeth and Sunny go to prison for after this brazen heist they pulled off.
  • myth_buster 8y ago
    Well, white collar crimes are not punishable offense.
    • peteretep 8y ago
      If you have some legal insight, I'm sure the Manafort team would love to hear from you.
      • URSpider94 8y ago
        While GP's comment is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the Manafort conviction is so newsworthy because it is such a rarity that white-collar criminals get prosecuted to this extent. It's the exception that proves the rule. Keep in mind, after the 2008 global financial crisis, in which several prominent financial institutions failed and millions of people lost their homes to foreclosure, only one banker was sentenced to jail time, and only for 30 months.
        • joering2 8y ago
          Why would you want to jail innocent people? Sorry to be a devils advocate but past administration loosened up rules based on which you were or were not supposed to be eligible for a loan to an extent which it should never be. Unless you want to jail George Bush or some of his staff members, there is not so much fault around to put on people working in financial sector.
          • TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
            I would love to jail George Bush and some of his staff members. Interestingly, you have just implied that ultimately no one can be held accountable for these failures. Isn't that a bit of a problem?
• saudioger 8y ago
  I mean, duh.
• madrox 8y ago
  It is hard to remember a time when Theranos wasn’t a byword for scamming, but if you have 15 minutes it’s worth searching HN for Theranos articles and look at comments from the very beginning.
  • THE_PUN_STOPS 8y ago
    Here’s two examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7951019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7951019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349
    • JauntyHatAngle 8y ago
      It seems from those comments there that a lot of people on here were quite sceptical to their methods from the start. There are a lump of people who appear excited in general, sure, but the people who appear to have know-how in the area are more subdued and questioning, even then. There are a fair few comments calling it garbage. Many people seem to have called it.
      • zeth___ 8y ago
        Where? The only thing even remotely negative I see in the top comments is questioning why they had so many big names on the board that had nothing to do with startups, biotechnology or medicine. In hindsight it seems like a way to keep the government away by trying to bribe people in it.
        • justAnotherNET 8y ago
          That’s exactly what I saw too, and veiled accusations of sexism against people questioning things.
          • astura 8y ago
            What specific comments in those two threads have "veiled accusations of sexism?"
• aj7 8y ago
  The big auction was on July 19. All the Mazaks are gone.
• sharkweek 8y ago
  Highly enjoyed Bad Blood and recommend it to anyone interested in some fine investigative journalism. I think the most disappointing thing about this whole saga is that (in theory) the Theranos technology was supposed to be a major healthcare game changer. It could have revolutionized testing, and would surely have saved countless lives. But instead... here we are.
  • jonathanjaeger 8y ago
    Well, in fairness, the technology wasn't there or possible (given current understanding of microfluidics), so it couldn't have revolutionized testing even if it was run more honestly. It could have harmed fewer people though if it never existed.
  • kranner 8y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the thesis of Bad Blood just that Theranos simply had no groundbreaking new technology? (and of course that Holmes and Balwani lied and bullied their way into an insane valuation for blood-testing tech that didn't exist and was propped up by third-party commercial testing machines)
    • sharkweek 8y ago
      Hmm... I guess you could boil it down to that, but the specific details outlined in the book make for a fascinating read imo
    • tptacek 8y ago
      They couldn't even do the basic stuff they fell back on after their groundbreaking machine failed to materialize, but they lied about it anyways and hacked COTS blood testing machines to accept fingerstick samples instead of the veinous draws they were designed to test --- which didn't work, and generated false results. They spent as much effort trying to contain stories and intimidate whistleblowers as they did on test accuracy. That'd be how I'd sum the book up. It is a page-turner; extremely well-written.
      • 8y ago
• jnordwick 8y ago
  r/theranosdidnothingwrong The Theranos Snap, everything disolves
• CamperBob2 8y ago
  That photo of Holmes suddenly makes me want to go check on my pet rabbit, BRB.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• kumarvvr 8y ago
  Good riddance. Hope both of the founders land in jail.
• jedberg 8y ago
  I'm sort of sad about this. I liked having a well known company headed by (and founded by) a woman to hold up as an example for my daughter. There are other billion dollar companies headed by women, but I think this was the only "science" one other than 23andme?
  • daok 8y ago
    Not really a good example for your daughter to be honest...
    • kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
      Nor is 23andme.
      • mc32 8y ago
        Well, I think we can generalize that to many Tech Companies in general, if you examine their "value add" Google, FB, Linked-In, etc. There is something unappealing in quite a few. Not that each one is _all_ bad, but many have at least _some_ bad. in them. G and FB obviously trade in user data. On the other hand AMZ leverages many lowly-paid warehouse workers. Netflix is unapologetic about getting people to "binge", they don't even apologize for the word binge (which is typically associated with unhealthy alcoholic intake). Yet, they all add some good value to many people as well, despite those flaws.
      • BadassFractal 8y ago
        Why is that? I'm out of the loop.
        • hcknwscommenter 8y ago
          I mean 23andme seems (to some) to originally have been a vanity project funded by Google founder's massive money to give wife something to do (super over the top uncharitable, misogynistic, chauvinistic characterization to answer the "why is that? question). However they have pivoted to something very interesting lately. They are now a drug development company and have hired some of the best in the business to mine their data and develop novel therapeutics. They have Germaine Fuh! 23andme is now a cool company!
• kstrauser 8y ago
  I really, really wanted their tech to be real. It could have been transformative. I've seen a lot of glee over their (well deserved) failure, but I'd much rather be celebrating their success.
• a-dub 8y ago
  That's a shame. But hey, it doesn't take much solvent for one drop of blood!
• samstave 8y ago
  Serious question, even if the answer is fairly obvious; What does the future hold for Elizabeth? I mean, how will a person who has done that and basically become a digital leper, recover or work again in any meaningful way? Change her name, learn a new language and move to another country?
  • sova 8y ago
    She's very ambitious but now most people have lost confidence in her, so she will be able to pursue meaningful goals but not with the help of many other people as before. Quite a pity, imagine charismatic people using their cunning to benefit the world instead.... what a place it would be.
    • TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
      That kind of charisma is toxic pretty much by definition. Also, when was the last time someone running an ethically clean and successful charity or social enterprise got the kind of press people like Holmes do? Holmes is a rich narcissistic kook, but Theranos was the product of a business culture which values hyper-driven narcissistic kooks who surround themselves with exploitation and drama over steady mature professionalism.
  • ekianjo 8y ago
    With her connections, it's hard to imagine she wont be able to find a way to keep venturing into new businesses. It's not like everyone who commits fraud ends up behind bars or something either.
  • dreamcompiler 8y ago
    Once she gets out of jail, I have no doubt she'll be able to raise money again, although probably not $billions. There are a lot of suckers out there.
  • Fnoord 8y ago
    Jail-time, surely? She has deceived investors. She's already not allowed to lead a company for the next 10 years.
• CptFribble 8y ago
  I hope I'm not becoming "that guy," but I feel like everyone is still missing the point on Theranos. Even if they hadn't defrauded investors, the company would never have had the impact they claim, because Theranos' entire finger-stick idea just doesn't fit into the lab industry. I spent a bunch of years in labs, working for the tech companies that made the "state of the art machines" that did the actual testing. Theranos wasn't only competing with LabCorp and Quest, they were also competing with the testing machine companies like Beckman-Coulter, Roche, Siemens, Bio-Rad, and many others. So many tests get ordered for a CMP (comprehensive metabolic panel, the most common battery of tests), that you would need like 30 finger sticks to get enough blood. Theranos never clarified if they could do 30 tests on 1 drop, or 1 test per drop. That little misdirect actually matters a lot to the patient who might have to get stuck 20+ times for all the things the doctor needs. I'm quite familiar with the way the state of the art systems work. A modern system is already testing microliters of plasma (your blood goes through a centrifuge) per test. Comparing size of blood draws is misleading. The several tubes that get drawn are for logistical reasons that don't go away if you switch to finger-sticks. For example, the law requires that a lab keep some blood on hand for emergency re-testing if it turns out you have a critical level. Maybe a tech drops your sample. Maybe the machine has a problem right when it's doing your test (happens all the time, no reason it wouldn't happen with the Theranos instrument, had it existed). How many finger sticks are required to keep some extra on hand? Theranos was also misleading about the test time, but that doesn't get mentioned either. They claimed 4-hour test time, but compared it to the 24-hour turn around time of a major lab like LabCorp. In reality, modern systems take 8-15 minutes for most tests, depending on what it is. Large molecules (hormones, etc) and whole-blood tests can take longer, sometimes up to 1.5 hours on older machines. Nothing approaching 4 hours, though. A 4 hours test time is atrociously long. And after all that, you still need a doctor to look at the results. Let's say the dream happened, and we all started going to Walgreens to get Theranos tested. Even if we got 30+ tests on a single finger-stick drop, we'd still need to wait 24-72 hours for the doctor to look at the results and call us. Maybe I'm beating a dead horse at this point, but I think from the very beginning, Theranos didn't have a serious business model. I also would like anyone on HN reading this, who's interested in the medlab space, to understand that there's a lot more going on than just testing on fingerpricks and fraud here. If any of you out there actually do have a revolutionary one-drop testing device, don't try to partner with Walgreens and open your own labs. Just sell/lease it directly to doctors and hospitals.
• deleted 8y ago
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• DubiousPusher 8y ago
  Did anyone ever follow that $100 million a hedge fund dumped into the company like a year ago, well into the crap htting the fan? What was that about? Why would you do that?
  • rrdharan 8y ago
    It was for their patents - as one of the other commenters mentioned, in the event that they fold, i.e. now, the hedge fund gains ownership of all their patents.
    • DubiousPusher 8y ago
      Did they hold any valuable patents? As I understand the FDA came out and said the device didn't work and beyond that any evidence suggesting it did was not just misguided but fraudulent.
  • syntaxfree 8y ago
    You can never rule out money laundering. Acquire a big stake of a failing company, claim proceeds from liquidation.
• a-dub 8y ago
  In seriousness, internet business culture makes everything look easy. Internet things have outsized impact due to the global reach of a revolution in communications technology. Smartphone things have outsized impact due to good UX finally reaching the masses when they were ready for it. I think the lesson here is that doing anything that interfaces directly with the physical and natural world is much harder, and those problems that have high impact have had a lot of very smart people working on them for a very long time. It's easy to think that the formula for internet media or smartphone IT success can easily translate to these domains, and it seems that the reality is "no, it doesn't.". There is no low hanging fruit on the hard problems, as there was with the internet and smartphone revolutions.
  • mrtksn 8y ago
    I like your approach but I disagree with your conclusion. Just recently Pepsi Co bought SodaStream for $3.2B. AFAIK, SodaStream is essentially a company that innovated with the UX outside the Internet-based technologies, not solving some hard problems. Theranos claimed to have been doing something similar but failed due to their choice of UX improvement approach being based on technology that does not work. An analogy in the internet-based business would be promising to improve the UX of customer support using AI and then not delivering on the AI part. I think that your "Outsized impact" concept is interesting but I think that there is no such thing, it's just an illusion due to the speed differences of the delivery of the impact. Should Theranos was not based on pseudo-science, the eventual impact could have been no smaller than your average internet unicorn.
    • a-dub 8y ago
      tldr; internet/smartphone success comes from low hanging fruit made possible by revolutions in communication technology. it does not translate to hard domains like biomedical science. these problems are legitimately hard. and quite orthogonal to soda and chatbots.
      • mrtksn 8y ago
        Theranos' was not about making something previously impossible, possible. Theranos doesn't have anything to do with biomedical science, they were supposed to improve the experience of blood testing both for the patient and for the medical professionals. Their problem was that they choose to try to do it by a method that was not technically possible at this time. Another company might try to improve the experience by improving the needles and redesign the machine to look like less offensive and scary and they might succeed in it. It's exactly like the difference between SodaStream's success and chatbots failure, that is, betting on UX improvement using a tech that's not there. Chatbots, SodaStream. Theranos - they don't do anything new that wasn't done before. Chatting with customer support was around since a while, Carbonating water to make soda was around since probably the industrial revolution and testing blood samples were around since modern medicine. All these companies tried to improve the experience and reduce costs, regardless of the nature of the business being internet or manufacturing based. It's not about the domain. EDIT: I'm not defending Theanos and I'm not going to comment about the motive of the people involved as I don't know them and I was not involved with Theanos at any time.
• msmith10101 8y ago
  Bad Blood is an awesome book. Really disturbing. There's a story about a naive stanford grad who joined Theranos and tried to blow a whistle internally when he realized that the "Edison" (a Theranos-based testing equipment) was BS. Holme's right-hand-man destroyed the kid, fired him, and even turned his grandfather against him (who was an investor - these Stanford fucktards and their legacies). Of course that stanford person is now pursuing his own startup... Bad Blood has not had the impact in SV that it should have. The stock market needs to crash and the myth of steve jobs needs to die :-(
  • nikdaheratik 8y ago
    > The stock market needs to crash and the myth of steve jobs needs to die It's not all about myths. The interest rates are still very low especially for the rate of growth. Decent returns are hard to find and people are willing to chase just about anything. Ofc, her decision to copy alot of Jobs' style made for some easy pickings.
• hcknwscommenter 8y ago
  The one thing I am very surprised so few people bring up is that finger sticks hurt like heck compared to a venous puncture. I give blood all the time, so much that I have scars from giving blood (and donating plasma in my youth). The only thing about giving blood that hurts is that darn finger prick to check your hematocrit. Sometimes I can't type the whole rest of the day. I would never choose a finger prick over a regular sample.
  • peteretep 8y ago
    Your experience is not mine, and I'm not sure it generalizes.
    • thaumasiotes 8y ago
      In my experience, getting shots or blood draws does not hurt. A finger prick might or might not. But I'd prefer the finger prick anyway because it's much less creepy than having a long needle stuck into your vein. Antivaccination movements historically pop up in all kinds of different places and contexts for different nominal reasons, and I'm pretty sure a big part of what gives them steam is that people just aren't comfortable with the physical logistics.
      • anyfoo 8y ago
        Interesting. I’d echo the original commenters sentiment. I have given blood a few times and was never really bothered about the long needle sticking in my arm, nor the process in which it got there, but the two times or so where I got the finger prick for a small amount of blood were a painful and inconvenient experience.
        • nojvek 8y ago
          Finger pricking and typing don’t go well together. One is a really annoying experience. One is like, “ooooh that didn’t hurt as much as I expected”
• anigbrowl 8y ago
  It's really worth reading through historical HN threads on Theranos to get a feel for how the media was content to serve as a PR outlet for such a long time, and how people were so taken with the narrative Holmes and her allies pitched..
• pfdietz 8y ago
  This is my surprised face. :|
• Chris2048 8y ago
  When you give blood they usually hide the bag, I suppose for the squeamish. But that drives me mad, just waiting there not knowing how much more to go - It's a natural progress bar!
• maxxxxx 8y ago
  I just finished Bad Blood and one thing I have noticed is that how much you can get away with if you have mastered the art of talking to powerful people. It seems they could have figured out much earlier that Theranos was a fraud if anybody had ever bothered to take a closer look. Even when some people started having doubts Holmes always was able to take herself out of it. Instead the whistleblowers got treated badly. The Shultz situation was especially frustrating to read. This reminds me a little of a situation at work. We have a director who everybody outside management knows he is full of sh.t. He never delivers anything and when you get the chance to talk to VP or CEO they agree that he needs to go. But then they talk to him and he always gets a second chance. This guy gets much more face time with our CEO then anybody else I know.
• adiusmus 8y ago
  Pardon my ignorance but what are the issues as to why something like what Theranos was proposing was so difficult? Is it that the underlying tech is too hard or is there some basic engineering that doesn’t exist yet? (Ignoring the fact they didn’t have a real solution / the whole thing was a scam etc)
  • bootlooped 8y ago
    My impression was that at least one issue is the sample size of blood needs to be large enough to be representative of the whole system. If you pick 5 skittles out of a bag, no amount of technology can make it so you can reliably determine the frequency of each color over the whole bag. There are other issues another comment describes well.
    • adiusmus 8y ago
      Good analogy. I’m not a medical person so I’m not sure about the statistical sample volume required for typical tests. I do know that I’ve had comprehensive testing done and they took 5 tubes the length of my finger. That’s pretty far from the drop of blood that Theranos were after. The future has a way of returning to these things. We’ll see if there’s even a partial approach that could work soon enough. Or not.
  • sjg007 8y ago
    There's an issue of false readings given the small volumes used. That's not to say that some tests are possible.
• ptman 8y ago
  How does the competition compare? https://nightingalehealth.com/ https://nightingalehealth.com/ ?
• godelmachine 8y ago
  Alright. So, can anyone answer the question, what’s gonna happen to Ms Holmes and what are the possible career trajectories she may take? Just wanna know what a brilliant person like her could do.
• theshadowknows 8y ago
  I can’t help but wonder if Theranos’ tech really was that good and they got crushed by big medicine? It really doesn’t seem all that far fetched to me.