Health and Healthcare
Theranos Death Watch (Update)
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Recently, 24/7 Wall St. posted its Theranos Death Watch Continues story. There have been several developments since then.
Disgraced Theranos Inc. founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes has resigned from President Barack Obama’s Presidential Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship advisory board.
Vanity Fair conducted an interview with Dr. Stephen Master, an associate professor of pathology and clinical medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College:
I think a lot of the interest in Theranos—certainly on my part, and I think for a number of my colleagues—came from the fact that they claimed they could do the full complement of laboratory tests from a few drops of blood. What they showed fell far short of that. They did not claim in the talk that they could do that, but certainly they had claimed that regularly in the past. They showed us a limited set of four tests on one set of subjects and another limited set of tests on another set of subjects. By itself, it didn’t match all of the claims that they had previously made.
Here is the 24/7 Wall St. assessment:
Holmes presented a new blood test system as a means to diversify beyond the company’s earlier, failed products. Based on most accounts, many scientists who saw the presentation thought it was a weak comeback attempt by a company that continues to die swiftly.
The new miniLab can run a large number of blood tests on a small amount of blood. At the launch, Holmes said:
The results we’ve presented demonstrate the inventions behind, and some of the analytical performance capabilities of, the miniLab system, a single platform that we have designed to process small sample volumes across a broad set of different test methodologies. The miniLab architecture provides a potential framework for testing in a decentralized setting, while maintaining centralized oversight. We hope to achieve FDA market authorizations of these exciting technologies in the coming years.
A very, very thin argument for the company’s turnaround. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) already has made ruinous evaluations of earlier Theranos products. And the miniLab will take a very long time to be evaluated. All this turnaround is to occur while Holmes is essentially banned from her own business.
The FDA has shuttered one of the Theranos labs and driven Holmes out of the blood-testing business for two years. Presumably, she will oversee the launch of the miniLab from exile.
For some odd reason, Theranos has decided to keep Holmes at the helm, instead of replacing her with an industry leader, although an industry leader probably would not take the job.
There are few industries in which a company with tainted products, along with federal investigations into its work, can survive. Medical products and services are at the top of that list.
Theranos needed to pitch a product that was bulletproof, and one for which it could make the case for a high probability of FDA approval. In its latest product release, it did neither. Theranos can’t stay in business for long.
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