Theranos adds qualified medical experts and scientists to advisory board | Hacker News Reader

Theranos adds qualified medical experts and scientists to advisory board

techcrunch.com

38 pointskqr237 comments

Who writes these articles? This is their Scientific board. "The board" almost always implies the company's corporate board which among other things can fire the CEO. Advisory boards just offer advice.

>> "scientific and medical advisory board"

> "Theranos adds a bunch of qualified medical experts and scientists to >the board<"

I am almost certain Theranos has always had an SAB (I don't know of a single company in this space that doesn't). Even my tiny startup 16 years ago had one. I've served on a couple myself and the role is very different.

I do wonder how involved the SAB has been given all the questions.

Edit: looking at the page I am now uncertain they had one, which would be very unusual for a life sciences company.

In regards to if they already had the SAB - pretty sure before this there was no scientific and medical advisory board, otherwise, why would they be adding so many members to it at once; meaning if that's the case, seems really, really fishy.

Thanks. We put "advisory board" in the title above.

Looks like a paid article.

At this point, I think the burden of proof is on Theranos to demonstrate that they weren't designed from the beginning to be a scam, initially aimed at the military but now just looking for any way to survive as a company.

I doubt they were designed from the beginning to be a scam. I do suspect they've been "looking for any way to survive as a company" since about 2006, and some of those ways include various scams.

Most folks, when faced with the reality that their original idea won't work and they don't have any idea how to make it work, fold up the company and go back to school or get a job. Some raise $800M, stack the board of directors with politicians and generals, and try to sell to the military.

I suspect this runs afoul of HN etiquette, but I had to comment on how amazing your ending paragraph was. Well done.

Most startups don't end up reaching profitability based on their orginal idea, instead, they change paths, then later reach success or failure.

> Some raise $800M, stack the board of directors with politicians and generals, and try to sell to the military.

Apply HN here I come...

Yup. "Think and grow rich" requires creative imagination and some experience to pivot into whatever has a better chance to become profitable, rather than just throw away value and opportunity. Even if folks really do want to get out, sell it to another shop, don't just put dynamite under or walk away.

I think this was always the plan - at least from early on. The only thing that surprises me is why Theranos didn't close up shop once the original plan failed.

That doesn't make any sense. Why would a company spend so long in development if they were a scam? They could have launched a fake product many years ago.

Their development efforts failed, and they clearly ran their lab horribly, but I don't see any evidence (or motivation) for the company being a scam from the beginning. What would their exit strategy have been if they had never intended to produce a viable innovation?

Some scams are played just on other people, but many, many more scams are started by fooling oneself.

>They could have launched a fake product many years ago.

>any evidence (or motivation) for the company being a scam from the beginning. What would their exit strategy have been if they had never intended to produce a viable innovation?

it wasn't pure scam (until of course you dare to call a shady government/military contracting a "scam" :). The story goes something like that that their exit was to sell the stuff to Pentagon, and unfortunately for them and all the high powered Theranos friends there happen to be a guy who insisted on FDA approval before that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/02/inter...

Very typical Theranos tactics: "Chief executive Elizabeth Holmes, the company’s superstar founder, asked an ally at the highest level of the military to squelch those “inaccurate” concerns in 2012"

The "ally" is 4-star Marine General who sits on the Theranos board right now :)

It makes sense to me. It is something I have thought before but hesitated to say: I think part of the problem is this company was founded by a charming, pretty, very intelligent and very young woman. And most people doing the advising are male.

I am a woman and my experiences have been that this is a serious handicap for getting effective constructive feedback. Men don't really want to have a serious conversation with me about what works, what doesn't, why that is true, etc. If they talk to me at all, many of them are either 1) trying to be charming, even if they have no explicit goal of trying to sleep with me or 2) trying to be encouraging, as if the deeply rooted problems of sexism boil down to "girls just lack confidence!"

It has been enormously frustrating.

I am older than the woman who founded Theranos. I am older and I have had a less cushy life and I have really struggled with the question of how to get my work taken seriously and how to get men to talk to me about my actual work in an actually constructive fashion. Things have gotten better, but I look at Theranos and I suspect that there was no intent to do anything fraudulent and she may not even fully recognize that it is a failure yet, because she has been talked at for so many years by so many intelligent, successful people like she was a genius and surely was on to something big.

I really think this is the likely crux of the problem and I see no good fix for it. I still find it maddeningly difficult to get men to take my work seriously. And I have been very aware that them talking to me for the wrong reason, about the wrong things is a real problem for quite some years.

>Men don't really want to have a serious conversation with me about what works, what doesn't, why that is true, etc. If they talk to me at all, many of them are either 1) trying to be charming, even if they have no explicit goal of trying to sleep with me or 2) trying to be encouraging, as if the deeply rooted problems of sexism boil down to "girls just lack confidence!"

that is too, plus it is probably the other side of the same coin - i mean why risk and get into serious conversation, provide constructive feedback which in large part means criticizing and risk getting exposed to potential claim of creating a "hostile environment for females".

Thanks for posting this. I think it would be valuable to the general tech community to hear your opinion and experiences. Please consider writing an article or giving a talk at a future conference.

What a shame for this to happen so late in the game. I don't know enough about medicine or medical engineering to know if Theranos' core goal is reasonably attainable...but having medical practitioners experienced in research and regulations would seem to have almost certainly prevented the shitshow that Theranos now has to dig itself out of...and their knowledge and experience of how much you can or can't fuck with regulators is probably something that Henry Kissinger, despite all of his authority and fame, does not have as much practical guidance on.

It's not even their actual board. This is more shenaniganry. It's all they know.

And how many medical and lab experts were on Theranos's scientific and medical advisory board before they added these eight?

The following press release only mentions two other members (one of whom is the CEO). It also uses the future tense to say "Theranos’ Scientific and Medical Advisory Board will meet quarterly."

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160407006056/en/Ther...

Pretty sure before this there was no scientific and medical advisory board, otherwise, why would they be adding so many members to it at once; meaning if that's the case, seems really, really fishy.

This company is already Andrea Rossi sketchy.

Is is appropriate to flag stories about Theranos? I doesn't seem appropriate to let them have an unfettered voice.

How is this giving Theranos a "unfettered voice" - seems like the opposite given that there's no one from the company to my knowledge in this thread of comments; yes, I realize the post is a direct link to an article on them.

It's a link to an article that has a very misleading headline. It's the kind of 'accident' I've come to expect from Theranos and Theranos's PR.

Horse / barn scenario... hard to see how that brand can recover without massive hustle and undeniable demonstration of proof for changed ways.

Theranos' goals were always fishy. The fact of the matter is that their vaunted "one drop of blood" technology is a smokescreen, as in reality almost all clinical blood tests use a very small amount of material for the actual test (a few micro-litres).

The reason why larger quantities of blood are routinely collected pertains not to the quantity used in the actual biochemical assay, but to the number of tests that may be carried out, and the greater ease of handling slightly larger quantities of sample than Theranos aims (aimed?) to handle. That is for their scientific model.

Their business model was based mostly on enabling blood to collected without the need for a qualified person (e.g. a phlebotomist or nurse). This they could do because the amount of blood collected, and the method of collection, circumvented existing legislation. However, if it turns out that this method of collection doesn't "scale" then it too is a wash.

Their saving grace might be if they can show that they can indeed perform assays on non-professionally collected blood to FDA-level standards. But that remains to be shown.

Probably should have done this, before, you know, (fraudulently?) claiming they had this amazing breakthrough.

Well, it's a step up from Henry Kissinger and Bill Frist, but it mainly still just proves they've got good connections. Doesn't say much about the tech.

This is just their medical and science advisory board, not their board of directors. Frist and Kissinger (ugh) are still on the BoD.

It's also not really a science advisory board and more of a medical/clinical board. This would be great for making sure the tech is working in the hands of its clients, but that seems to me to be putting the cart before the horse maybe. Is not the tech itself something that needs advising? Maybe not - maybe the tech is so basic, not particularly novel, or so well completed that there is no further technology push to be made. Or maybe these people are actually really capable with respect to basic research in addition to their medical focus - hard to tell without more detailed biographies.

Says nothing at all about the tech.

Theranos had their shot... Walgreens pulled all their in-store advertising.

I wonder what Theranos is worth now?

Wild guess: negative money

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