31–40 of 257 posts
There was zero indication that they had actually overcome any of those issues.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just finished reading the new book on Theranos. I’ve seen very similar things at other science based/biotech startups. In particular, over-promising and misrepresenting the state of development. Quite often these companies are funded by traditional tech investors who don’t know how to do DD on science-based/biotech startups. The difference with Theranos is that they messed with the FDA. They did consumer testing, a…
I think most of what went wrong with the FDA happened after Carreyrou's first WSJ article came out, didn't it? That WSJ article basically killed the company.
“AFTER ALL THE DELAYS, the partnership seemed to finally be getting off the ground in the early months of 2012: as a beta run before a full launch, the companies had agreed that Theranos would take over the blood testing at an employee health clinic Safeway had opened on its corporate campus in Pleasanton. The clinic was part of Burd’s strategy to curb the supermarket operator’s health-care costs by encouraging its workers to take better care of themselves.”
Carreyrou's first article was October 2015. I think the Walgreens stuff had kicked off by then too. The FDA probably took a while to deal with it. But by putting a non-working instrument in a consumer facing context they were clearly going to get involved at some point.
If they hadn’t done that, I don’t think it would have been a news story, or that legal action would have been taken.
This stuff happens relatively often, investors just right-off the investment (or otherwise try and dump it).
The most amazing thing about this whole situation is that there were experts in the field who were shouting out about the impossibility of Holmes' claims right from the beginning. The media, though, never paid enough attention (or was possibly subverted by Theranos itself) to the naysayers. These incidents ought to remind us the exponentially important role media plays in our lives and how important it is that we com…
Were there? I'm not doubting your claim, just wondering if anyone really spoke up.
Reading about the challenges they would have had to overcome to back up their claims, there were some serious fundamental problems, and those were challenges the industry had been wrangling with when it came to that type of automated testing for ages.... I always wondered how many of their competitors were thinking:
"No way they overcame all that all at once.... straight up not possible."
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The full process as described in the book is even more shocking. Theranos would dilute the finger stick draws, and then run them on the Siemens machines 5 times. In theory, you could then calculate the concentration, and adjust for the dilution. In reality, the diluted samples would have concentrations of the relevant cells and elements that were too low to pick up. To “fix” this, they would do those 5 runs, then cal…
I don't know much about Theranos, but I remember writing a proof in university. The TA in the class was a PhD student doing research in group theory. My proof relied on doing some manipulation of exponents and there was a point where I was doing "1 + (-1) = 0". The TA just could not understand that bit. He was absolutely sure that in some circumstances this wouldn't hold. No amount of discussion about how integers fo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think most of what went wrong with the FDA happened after Carreyrou's first WSJ article came out, didn't it? That WSJ article basically killed the company.
Cepth’s comment looks more in-depth. But I dug out the following quote, I think this was the first kind of consumer facing testing: “AFTER ALL THE DELAYS, the partnership seemed to finally be getting off the ground in the early months of 2012: as a beta run before a full launch, the companies had agreed that Theranos would take over the blood testing at an employee health clinic Safeway had opened on its corporate ca…
I think this alone would probably be illegal?
This is not to mention all the other shady stuff that Theranos did in pitching investors. E.g., falsely claiming that they had machines being used in the field with the US Army, and that Johns Hopkins had validated results from their finger prick blood tests. This would also seem to be outright securities fraud?
Carreyrou may have exposed Theranos, but the sheer amount of illegality at the company seemed to have been going on for years.
Weren't most of the investors not actually the "standard" Silicon Valley investors?
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/theranos/investors/i...
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I think most of what went wrong with the FDA happened after Carreyrou's first WSJ article came out, didn't it? That WSJ article basically killed the company.
The timeline/impact is a bit murkier. Carreyou had two big revelations. One was that Theranos was not running blood tests on their proprietary machines, which were supposed to do finger prick draws. The other was that Theranos had submitted fraudulent validation data to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and state regulatory bodies. They did a couple brazenly unethical and illegal things. 1) CMS subc…
The most amazing thing about this whole situation is that there were experts in the field who were shouting out about the impossibility of Holmes' claims right from the beginning. The media, though, never paid enough attention (or was possibly subverted by Theranos itself) to the naysayers. These incidents ought to remind us the exponentially important role media plays in our lives and how important it is that we com…
When you immediately equate all self-doubt with Impostor Syndrome -- rather than develop actionable heuristics to detect when said doubt is justified -- don't feign surprise when some people take it seriously. Maybe they were just fooled by your confidence.
("You" in the general sense, not you personally.)
But we can be very surprised at the disparity in treatment between Theranos execs, who got off scott free, and Pharma Bro, who made all his investors whole and still got prison.
Right, and how should we feel about Nautilus as a fraud since they don't pay their contractors? Also not surprised? https://nwu.org/an-open-letter-from-freelancers-at-nautilus-...