Theranos Is Subject of Criminal Probe by U.S

Post by wpietri » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 1:35 AM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #72

toomuchtodo wrote: post #48

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> Someone out there needs to attack healthcare. All the attacking that needs to be done is political/social, not technical. Want to attack healthcare? Strip middlemen out so that the money flows to providers and researchers (Single payer + pouring additional money into the NIH/NSF, with the results being public domain). All of these YC startups I see "hacking" healthcare (Dr Chrono, HealthSherpa, etc) are just bandai…

Here is a good factual overview of why Single Payer won't make health care cheap in the US: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-30/single-paye...

Post by lvs » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 1:36 AM UTC

alsocasey wrote: post #76

lvs wrote: post #59

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No. I multiplied 1 nM by Avogadro's number. Do you have any reason to believe that free IgG is not uniformly distributed at steady-state in circulation? ... Because that's what they're testing for.

Many (most) of the things we're interested in measuring in blood are bound to some sort large macro-molecular assembly... be it cells, lipid vesicles, large protein agglomerates, etc.

Post by zadig » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 1:41 AM UTC

nextos wrote: post #87

Animats wrote: post #31

Theranos isn't even at the leading edge of blood testing. There are now hand-held FDA-approved immediate blood testing devices.[1][2][3] Most of these require smaller amounts of blood than a remote lab, although more than a drop. Theranos is still in the send-it-to-the-lab-and-wait era. Even if Theranos' technology eventually works, it may be obsolete before it ships. [1] https://www.abbottpointofcare.com/products-se…

The healthcare industry is quite inefficient at allocating money to things that are needed and have a decent chance of working. For example, in the field of oncology there's very little money put into cheap accurate early screening. And an almost obsessive pour of money into trying to understand mid-to-late stage cancers. Even James Watson has criticized this. It's a sad situation, because we now know early pre-clini…

Post by hooloovoo_zoo » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 1:47 AM UTC

Fede_V wrote: post #41

lvs wrote: post #35

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> blood constituents are not evenly distributed at small volumes You're saying they're running into statistical stochasticity? Are you claiming they were sampling femtoliter volumes? That's the how small you'd have to get for your claim to be true.

Actually, yeah. The variance in the amount of quantities present in the blood draws by Theranos is too high to get useful measurements (without very many replicates, defeating its purpose) according to published research: http://ajcp.oxfordjournals.org/content/144/6/885.abstract I was also utterly astonished when I read this. Even if the experimental error of the instrument was zero, you cannot reduce the biological…

Post by mattzito » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 1:57 AM UTC

bonniemuffin wrote: post #105

mattzito wrote: post #90

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> For example, in the field of oncology there's very little money put into cheap accurate early screening. And an almost obsessive pour of money into trying to understand mid-to-late stage cancers. Even James Watson has criticized this. I'm in no way an expert, but isn't part of that related to increasing evidence that early detection of a tumor isn't necessarily a benefit? I recall reading many tumors stop or grow s…

You're definitely right that merely detecting tumors earlier doesn't always help, because many of them are relatively slow-growing and fairly harmless. But this actually makes a very specific kind of early detection research even more important: research to help us predict which early-stage tumors will progress to becoming deadly, and which ones won't. Currently we're pretty bad at making this prediction for many kin…