Theranos – Bad Blood
So, the Big Red Car just finished reading Bad Blood, the John Carreyrou book about the rise and fall of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes. It is a good read.
Theranos was the brain child of Elizabeth Holmes, Stanford drop out, who hated being stuck with needles when giving blood. She “invented” a new approach in which a simple pinprick of blood could be used to conduct a myriad of different blood tests.
At scale, she was going to put these machines – portable blood analyzers – in patients’ homes and at drug stores. It was to be the fast food of blood testing with almost immediate results. The key to it was a small sample size, miniaturization, and almost instant results.
It sounded too good to be true. It was.