Thursday, October 6, 2016

Theranos Closing Its Labs and "Wellness Centers"

See an "open letter" on the Theranos website, and an open access post at TechCrunch and at Forbes.

For story at Wall Street Journal, here.


At TechCrunch:
"Theranos is closing its labs and wellness centers, CEO Elizabeth Holmes announced today in a post on the company blog. And this isn’t a temporary closure: the “approximately” 340 employees running them are out of a job.
“After many months spent assessing our strengths and addressing our weaknesses, we have moved to structure our company around the model best aligned with our core values and mission,” Holmes wrote.
The company pivoted away from working on its closely held “nanotainer” technology to a “miniLab” in August. The boxy device — unveiled at the American Association for Clinical Chemistry conference — collects small samples of blood and urine and then uploads them to a centralized system for further analysis.
And it’s a far cry from what the company, once valued at $9 billion, set out to do. According to several experts whom TechCrunch spoke to at the unveiling, it might not be very innovative, either. Although Theranos didn’t want its new device referred to as a “lab on a chip,” that’s essentially what these experts said the miniLab was. And that has been done....."
For an archive of several hundred Theranos articles over ten years, here.