Regulators Propose Banning Theranos Founder from Blood Testing

Post by kchoudhu » Thu, Apr 14, 2016, 7:19 AM UTC

jobu wrote: post #84

rzt wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In discussion on other HN threads, some commenters suggested that the board was composed that way to grease the wheels of a DoD acquisition of the company's "tech". As OP put it [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11403165 ]: John the more I think about Theranos the more I think this “mess” is actually deliberate. Looking at the history of Theranos and the composition of the board it appears Theranos was designed…

The first part seems probable (sell to the DoD), but intentional fraud is unlikely. Remember Hanlon's Razor - "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence." It seems more likely they were very close on the science, and decided to run with it while they worked out the last 10%. That works great for most tech companies, but healthcare technology is very different.

Post by return0 » Thu, Apr 14, 2016, 7:45 AM UTC

chollida1 wrote: post #16

I can't imagine the stress she must be under right now, unfortunately, it seems like the vast majority of it was her own doing. Will be interesting to see what the company does. Normally the CEO would be "asked" to step down from having any involvement with the company whatso ever. However, I believe she's the majority shareholder so the usual remedy of removing her from the company altogether might not work so well.…

Post by mk1202 » Thu, Apr 14, 2016, 8:08 AM UTC

forgotpwagain wrote: post #152

entee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard from a friend who is fairly prominent in the microfluidics space (doing lab work with much smaller amounts of material than ordinarily required) that initially it was a drug delivery company. Delivering compounds in a reliable time released way is challenging and valuable, and I think their initial foray was in that direction. Apparently it didn't work well early on and they pivoted in this direction, so mayb…

Microfluidics is a sexy field. About ten years ago, it was nearing the peak of its first hype peak. This brought a lot of attention to the field and corresponded to the first time people started talking about precision medicine and "lifestyle" diagnostic tools. Theranos was at the right time with a very intriguing idea, but one that was ultimately not a model for reality. They were able to get lots of capital at this…

Post by mk1202 » Thu, Apr 14, 2016, 8:10 AM UTC

joezydeco wrote: post #77

kneel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not obvious that the diagnostic assays they were running couldn't scale down. These assays are performed regularly on large samples no problem, but the sensitivity and accuracy of the assay becomes erratic when you only have a couple micro liters of blood. Either they couldn't develop proper assays (an engineering problem) or microliters of blood don't contain enough substrates for their assays (a major lapse in…

It was obvious to a great number of other diagnostics firms that this technology was hard to scale down. I was at one of those firms 25 years ago and they were working on it back then. Either they abandoned the effort, or are still trying, but they haven't launched a single microfluidic immunoassay.

Post by specialist » Thu, Apr 14, 2016, 8:40 AM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #133

jobu wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first part seems probable (sell to the DoD), but intentional fraud is unlikely. Remember Hanlon's Razor - "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence." It seems more likely they were very close on the science, and decided to run with it while they worked out the last 10%. That works great for most tech companies, but healthcare technology is very different.

Tillett’s Razor - ”Never ascribe to incompetence that which can be explained by corruption”