Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know of any good articles on the actual tech she is supposedly developing?

Like some other folks here, I am kind of weirded out by this company that seems to be worth so much, yet seems to have, so far, done so very little. I wonder if "brilliant young woman" does, in fact, equal "cult of personality." I am a woman. I have a tendency to attract a lot of attention, but usually for the wrong reasons. I have had a very hard time translating that into work that is worth something to other people and that puts money in my pocket. Some of the things I have experienced makes me inclined to fear that pretty young woman, charming all kinds of brilliant men, is all this boils down to. I fear it is, in fact, vaporware.

I am reminded of the vintage wine scam that occurred a few years ago (which I just posted two links to).

Edit: The wine scam links I posted, for future reference:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10474174

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10474167

As far as I know, there isn't any concrete public info on their technology platform. Supposedly it is on the way to address the recent problems.

One of the few peer-reviewed articles (with Holmes as a co-author) that uses Theranos technology I see indexed on PubMed is ref. [0]. The results aren't mind blowing, and I have issues with their statistics methodology. This article doesn't really go into the technology, and as a reviewer, I would have given them hell for not even including a cursory description.

There is also a recent commentary in Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine that could be of interest, at ref. [1].

[0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4091290/

[1] http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/cclm.2015.53.issue-7/cclm-20...

Thank you very much.

Excerpt from [1]:

Are all these accolades enough to guarantee that the company will deliver the promised goods in healthcare? The answer is no. History teaches us that there are numerous examples of seemingly disruptive technologies in healthcare (and especially in diagnostics), developed by high-profile scientists, including Nobel Laureates, which later collapsed, due to their inability to deliver the promised goods.

I feel like my sanity is partially restored, and I haven't even finished the first article.

If I may, I'd like to also direct attention to the last paragraph in the "Costs" section. Certainly this perspective is under active debate, but even if Theranos is able to deliver on their promises (and they could), their fundamental hypothesis may be flawed.

Thank you. Very good call. Not at all what I expected it to be, based on the context when you were pointing it out. Very pertinent information and fits with a lot of things I understand to be true.

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