The story of the ambitious startup Theranos is coming to an inglorious end. One of Theranos' largest investors, hedge fund Partner Fund Management LP, filed a lawsuit in Delaware court on Monday against the medical startup. The plaintiff accuses the company's management of falsifying the results of testing a technology that allows for a full-fledged medical blood test based on a few drops of blood.
Theranos technology was considered one of the major discoveries in the medical industry for Lately, and in 2014, the head of the company and its founder at that time, 30-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, was named the youngest female billionaire with her own fortune. However, complete secrecy and refusal to publish the results of their research in medical journals gave rise to a number of questions about the correctness of the tests performed, which grew into a huge scandal that began in October last year.
According to statement of claim Partner Fund Management LP (PFM) Holmes provided false information to attract the $96.1 million required at the initial stage.
“Theranos and its executives knowingly and repeatedly lied about the performance of their technology, reporting that they were on the verge of obtaining all necessary regulatory approvals, and also concealed the truth about the cost-effectiveness of their technology and the methods used in the analysis,” the hedgehog said in a statement. fund.
In its letter to hedge fund clients, PMF management also notes that there was securities fraud on the part of Theranos management. WSJ sources report that the US Securities and Exchange Commission has also launched an investigation into Theranos for securities fraud.
In a statement emailed to Theranos shareholders, the company's management stressed that the lawsuit was not "material" and the allegations were "not based on fact" and thanked those investors who "understand and continue to support the company." It is noteworthy that most of the statements by Theranos representatives cited in the lawsuit were made after PFM invested $96.1 million in early 2014, thus, according to the management of the medical startup, the investor could not have been deceived.
It is important that the lawsuit filed on Monday by PFM was the first lawsuit against Theranos by investors who invested about $800 million in the company. Previously, none of the investors had opposed the company’s management during a difficult year for Theranos.
The first complaints about the Holmes project began to be received in October 2015 after a WSJ article in which former employees of the company claimed that most of the tests offered by Theranos were not carried out on the company’s own equipment, but using Siemens technologies. At the same time, customers provided only a few drops of blood, which, according to Theranos, was enough to conduct all basic tests. As a result, according to the authors of the article, Theranos employees were forced to dilute the blood to conduct tests on standard equipment. As a result, the test results provided by Theranos differed significantly from those obtained using traditional methods, and the company was forced to recall thousands of them.
In June 2016, Forbes revised Holmes' net worth from $4.5 billion to zero. Holmes owns a 50% stake in Theranos, which was valued at $9 billion at the beginning of the year but was downgraded to $800 million in June. However, investors who own the remaining stake in Theranos have preferred shares and are thus entitled to priority payments in bankruptcy, as a result of which Holmes's share is effectively worthless.
In October, Holmes was forced to cut more than 40% of its workforce when it announced the closure of all of the company's clinical laboratories and wellness centers. In July, the head of Theranos was suspended from managing and owning medical laboratories for two years, and the company itself lost the right to receive cash for laboratory services under US federal health insurance programs. Holmes also said that a new direction for the company will be the MiniLab, a portable device that allows blood analysis to be carried out in a few drops.
In the fall of 2003, 19-year-old Stanford sophomore Elizabeth Holmes burst into the office of her teacher, medical instrumentation professor Channing Robertson, and immediately declared: “Let's start a company.”
Rusbase publishes the story of the youngest American billionaire.
Elizabeth Holmes burst into Professor Channing Robertson's office and declared: “Let's open a company.”
Robertson had seen thousands of students during his 33-year teaching career, but he barely knew Holmes. more than a year. “I knew right away that she was different,” Robertson tells Fortune. “The way she approaches complex technical problems in a new way is a first for me.”
Holmes recently returned from a summer internship at the Genome Institute in Singapore. She was able to get there thanks to her knowledge of the Chinese language, which she learned on her own back in school years in Houston. Returning to Palo Alto, she showed Robertson the patent application she had drafted. During her freshman year, Holmes took Robertson's advanced drug-targeted transport seminar, which included innovative patches, tablets and even contact lens-like films that release glaucoma drugs. But what Holmes suggested was new even to Robertson. It was a patch that, along with the introduction of medicine into the body, could monitor changes in the patient’s blood composition, thereby determining the effectiveness of the therapy and changing the dosage of the medicine if necessary.
“I remember how she reasoned: they say, you can also attach a microchip to it, which through mobile communications will transmit data to the attending physician or the patient himself,” Robertson recalls. - I jumped on the spot. After all, I’ve been working in this field for more than thirty years, and it never occurred to me that you could simply combine delivery systems and monitoring tools.”
Channing Robertson,
Despite this, he advised her to delay starting a business until after graduation. "I asked her, 'Why do you want to do this?' And she replied: “Because such systems can completely change the principle of providing medical care. This is what I'm interested in doing. I don't want to work on incremental changes or improvements to any technology. I want to create absolutely new technology, which could help all people, regardless of their situation and place of residence.”
This convinced him. “When I realized what really made this girl tick, I thought I was looking at another Steve Jobs or Bill Gates,” he says.
With Robertson's blessing, Holmes opened the company, and after one semester she dropped out to devote her full time to work. Now 31 years old, under her leadership a whole corporation called Theranos (short for “therapy” and “diagnosis”) has grown in Palo Alto with a staff of 500 employees. The company raised $400 million by selling shares to investors, valuing it at $9 billion.
“For me, first and foremost, this is an opportunity to do something good,” Holmes says of his company. “This is an opportunity to change the health care system by leveraging our capabilities, which is innovative and creative thinking, and the ability to create technology that will be the answer to many challenges.”
At first glance, what Theranos is doing now has little in common with the project that impressed Robertson at the time. But, as it turned out, for Holmes these are just different “incarnations” of the same basic ideas.
Today, Theranos is seen as a brazen upstart with the potential to disrupt the established US medical diagnostics industry, with annual sales of $73 billion and 10 billion tests a year, which inform 70% of all medical decisions. The two largest federal health insurance programs, Madicare and Medicaid, collectively provide about $20 billion annually to reimburse testing costs.
Theranos operates what it calls a CMS-certified "high-complexity laboratory" and is licensed to operate in nearly every state. Currently, the laboratory performs more than 200 types of blood tests, and plans to increase them to 1000. For all tests, blood is drawn without a syringe.
At Theranos, a few drops of a patient’s blood are enough to perform an analysis, from one hundredth to a thousandth of the amount of blood that is taken in conventional laboratories - a life-saving opportunity for those who frequently donate blood for analysis, for cancer patients, the elderly, children, and obese patients and simply for those who cannot stand the sight of blood. Exfusion technicians draw blood through a microscopic puncture in the finger, using a patented method that eliminates the slightest discomfort. Feels more like a touch than a prick.
The laboratory can analyze 70 different parameters on a single blood sample of 25-50 microliters, collected in a tiny vial the size of an electrical fuse, which Holmes also calls a “nanotainer.” If conventional methods were used, such a set of tests would require several tubes of blood, each with a volume of 3000-5000 microliters.
The fact that Theranos' technology can use such microscopic volumes of blood gives doctors much more flexibility when ordering what's called a surveillance blood test. A control blood test is ordered if an abnormality is detected in the results of the initial analysis, and is performed on the same sample as the initial analysis to document this abnormality. Thus, control analysis saves time and does not cause inconvenience, unnecessary expenses and pain to the patient.
Ready test results in a Theranos laboratory can be obtained within a few hours - approximately the same time as in conventional stationary laboratories. Although the latter can perform an analysis of at most 40 parameters in the same time.
And most importantly, tests at Theranos are cheaper. Prices here are 2-4 times lower than in other independent laboratories, and 4-10 times lower than in hospital laboratories. Such prices are a real boon for insurance companies and taxpayers. Company policy states that the price for each procedure should not exceed half of the Medicare benefit for the same procedure. If this practice is extended throughout the country, then American system health insurance will save billions. In addition, the company posts all its prices on the website. It would seem that this is a common practice, but not in the world of paid medicine, where pricing is usually opaque, often arbitrary and unreasonable.
The methods used at Theranos are a trade secret. Holmes would only say that her company uses “the same basic chemistry methods” that are used in all other laboratories. And all their achievements lie in the field of “optimization of chemistry” and “active use of software,” which allows the use of traditional methods for the analysis of samples of smaller volume.
Theranos' analysis volume is currently small. Blood samples (as well as saliva, urine, feces and other materials) are accepted at only a few locations: one is at the company's headquarters in Palo Alto, and another 21 collection points are at Walgreens pharmacies (the second largest pharmacy chain in the United States) in Palo Alto and Phoenix. But this is just the beginning. Walgreens plans to place Theranos test collection sites at most of its 8,200 pharmacies in all 50 states. This will be the first step in Holmes's bold plan to have Theranos centers everywhere and be accessible to all Americans. In an interview with Fortune magazine, Walgreens CEO Greg Wasson said he later hopes to open labs at its partner pharmacies in Europe, Alliance Boots.
At least three major hospital chains have expressed a willingness to actively work with Theranos to develop their own laboratories: UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco, Dignity Health, which has hospitals in 21 states, and Intermountain Healthcare, which has a network of 22 hospitals in Utah and Idaho.
“I think this is an incredible opportunity,” Mark Laret, CEO of UCSF Medical Center, said of what he saw at Theranos. “After all, here it is, in front of us, what we have been waiting for - a real opportunity to change the entire healthcare system.”
“When I first heard about Theranos Laboratories, I thought it was a hoax,” says David Helfet, director of trauma and orthopedics at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan. But, having studied volumes of research confirming the effectiveness of the methods, he became an active supporter of the new diagnostics and is now trying to convince the management of his clinic to equip the same laboratory.
"This is real data, not just your own interpretation of it," he says. (Helfet also admitted that Theranos invited him to join the company's advisory board, but he has not yet accepted the invitation.)
Helfet believes it is possible to use Theranos laboratory procedures to detect so-called hospital-acquired infections. Traditional methods for identifying strains and determining appropriate antibiotics can take three to five days because they involve plating the bacteria on agar in a Petri dish. All this time the patient is forced to remain on hospital bed, take ineffective antibiotics, unwittingly contributing to the development of a resistant strain. And the technique developed by Theranos allows one to determine the DNA of a bacterium and its resistance to antibiotics within four hours. Moreover, the procedure will cost less than traditional analysis.
“This will change the approach to medical care in general,” says Helfet. (Although Theranos scientists are not the pioneers of this kind of DNA analysis itself, Holmes says they have managed to significantly reduce the cost of the process.)
Not only the volume of blood taken for testing has decreased. The analytical systems used at Theranos are also ultra-compact. The entire installation only takes most area of a regular laboratory.
“The same tests can now be performed in an area that is 10 or even 100 times smaller than before,” says Mark Laret. So it is possible that someday such laboratories will be equipped directly in operating rooms, in ambulance helicopters, in medical units on warships and submarines, or in refugee camps somewhere in Africa. (Externally, the analyzers look like large computers. Holmes refuses to explain how they work and will not even allow them to be photographed, citing trade secrets. They are assembled in an unmarked manufacturing facility located in an industrial park in Newark, California.)
What do current players in the medical diagnostics market think about all this?
The most common criticism of Theranos is that it uses supposedly breakthrough technology to conduct tests that often affect life-saving decisions without first publishing evidence of its safety and effectiveness in peer-reviewed journals. "I don't know what they're measuring, how they're measuring it, or why they're confident in their results," says oncologist Richard Bender, who is also a medical adviser to Quest Diagnostics, a major network of independent laboratories.
Holmes counters that since, as noted, her analyzes are based "on the same basic chemical methods” as other analyses, publication of confirmations in peer-reviewed journals is unnecessary and unnecessary.
This dispute arose because of the existing verification system that is used in many - although not all - traditional laboratory tests, and gives them an additional degree of reliability, but is not yet used in Theranos tests. The fact is that most laboratories, such as Quest or Laboratory Corp., conduct sample testing on analyzers purchased from professional manufacturers medical equipment– Siemens, Olympus, Beckman Coulter, etc. All these manufacturers must obtain permission from the FDA food products and US medicines (Food and Drug Administration - FDA), which confirms proper quality analyzers. And this is in addition to the certification procedure with the Federal Health Insurance Agency, which every laboratory must pass in order to be able to work in the United States.
At the same time, for many other procedures, traditional laboratories may use methods they have developed in-house that are not registered with the FDA. And although the Office formally has the right to demand registration of these laboratory-developed methods, so far the agency has refrained from exercising this right.
Theranos, which does not purchase analyzers from third parties, is thus in a unique position. Since it does not sell its equipment, it does not require FDA approval. Analyzers are used only in our own laboratory that has been properly certified. And all tests performed are based on methods developed in laboratories that are exempt from FDA oversight.
Holmes sees no reason to criticize Theranos for operating within these boundaries, since other laboratories are in no hurry to register their methods with the FDA. “Traditional laboratories use thousands of studies that are not FDA-approved or published in peer-reviewed publications,” she says. (In fact, the nonprofit American Clinical Laboratory Association strongly opposes any attempt by the FDA to review existing laboratory techniques, and even suggests that the agency has no authority to do so.)
Moreover, Holmes emphasizes that Theranos currently intends to apply to the FDA for voluntary review and confirmation of all types of tests performed. To this end, she has already sent hundreds of pages of documents with supporting data to the Office. Thus, Theranos may become the first laboratory to voluntarily seek certification of its methods.
The biotechnology company Theranos provides incomplete and incorrect information about its work to investors and clients, The Wall Street Journal has found. The investigation, which took the WSJ several months, showed that Theranos conducts the vast majority of blood tests not on Edison’s own innovative device, but on standard equipment from other manufacturers, for example, the German concern Siemens.
According to WSJ sources, including former subordinates of Holmes, as of December 2014, Theranos’ unique technology - according to the company, the fastest, most accurate and economical on the market - was in fact used in only 15 types of analyzes, while about 200 types were produced traditionally way.
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Elizabeth Holmes, youngest American billionaire
Elizabeth Holmes founded her company, Theranos, at age 19. She created new way a blood test that does not require numerous tubes of blood, but rather one drop taken from a finger is enough for more than 30 tests. Over 12 years, Theranos' capitalization reached nine billion dollars. Now all American states have allowed the use of new technology on their territory, which will lead to the rapid replacement of old tests with new ones throughout the country, and then throughout the world. The thing is that the new method of blood analysis is not only much easier for the patient, but also tens of times cheaper to use, simpler and faster. A small drop of blood taken from thumb, replaces 10 tubes of blood taken from a vein.
Elizabeth dropped out of university as a dropout, like several famous IT entrepreneurs, including Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Michael Dell (Dell), Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Jean Come (Whatsapp). In Ask Lavinia there was once a question whether it is so important higher education, because you can learn everything yourself. This question shows a lack of understanding of Western realities: the main thing is not to graduate from university, but to enroll in it. Most of the above dropped out of Stanford or Harvard. The value of a diploma from a good university is not in what was taught there (especially since you have to be mentally retarded to not be able to finish it after entering), but in the fact that you managed to pass the competition and be accepted. This is what serves as a signal later life. Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford, but she got there first & that is all that matters.
The reason I chose Holmes for this column, among other things, is that she actively promotes the idea of personal responsibility for one's health. Theranos has opened mini-laboratories in hundreds of Walgreens (American pharmacies and grocery stores), where for little money visitors can order any blood tests and have them done right on the spot. Your health is your responsibility and your decision on how to spend your money. Not the state, not the local clinic, not the local therapist, but yours. This approach forces people to think, search for information, thoughtfully choose a doctor, allocate funds correctly, and so on. In a word, rely primarily on yourself. However, this is the culture of all of America, which has made it a super-economy.
They write that Holmes considers the late Steve Jobs his icon and even dresses in all black, as he did. There's no denying that she's a very cute reincarnation of Jobs. And black suits her very well, but, of course, her brilliant brain suits her even more. Smart eyes are the best adornment of a person, no s..t, Sherlock.
The world's youngest billionaire, Elizabeth Holmes, has lost her fortune. She has been called “Steve Jobs in a skirt” and a self-made woman. The business that brought her billions of dollars was literally involved in blood. The founder of Theranos and the creator of new medical technologies is no longer a billionaire; her business has collapsed.
Why is Elizabeth Holmes famous?
The world learned about Elizabeth Holmes in 2013, when her company Theranos began collaborating with the largest pharmacy chain in the United States, Walgreens. The essence of the idea was the following: you can now quickly and painlessly do a blood test in a pharmacy.
For analysis, one small drop of blood is taken from a finger; the prick is not felt, only a touch, and collected in a tiny container. No more need to draw blood from a vein with a syringe, no more need to take large volumes - one drop is enough to do more than 100 tests.
This allows the unpleasant and painful process of donating blood to be turned into a quick and easy procedure, what a relief for children, the elderly and, above all, patients with serious illnesses who have to constantly do blood tests.
In addition, the processing of studies at Theranos is fast, a maximum of 4 hours, and the cost of analyzes is significantly cheaper than in other laboratories. Theranos focuses on a transparent pricing policy - the cost of each test is clearly stated on their official website.
The press began to write about the company and its founder. Elizabeth Holmes became famous and gained fame as the youngest woman in the world to earn billions of dollars on her own.
State
In 2014, Forbes estimated Holmes' net worth at $4.5 billion, and she owns half of Theranos, which is valued at $9 billion. She is general director and founder of Theranos.
How I got rich
Elizabeth Holmes was born in Washington on February 3, 1984. In 2002 she entered Stanford University, but dropped out in 2003 before completing her second year. Elizabeth decides to start her own business and opens the company Real-Time Cures, which she later renames Theranos. We must pay tribute to her parents, they do not prevent their daughter from doing this and allow the money set aside for her studies to be invested in her startup.
Holmes has been creating and developing his company for 10 years. According to her, she has not been on vacation for 10 years. Elizabeth does not watch TV, does not read novels, does not communicate with friends, all her time is devoted to her company and this has already brought impressive results. Holmes holds numerous patents both in the United States and abroad. In 2014, she managed to attract the interest of venture investors for $400 million.
Holmes claims that he is afraid of the sight of blood and needles, and this was one of the impetuses for creating a painless blood test.
Failure
Unfortunately, beautiful fairy tale about a young, smart billionaire changing her life for the better is over. The rapid rise gave way to an even faster fall.
It all started with an article in the Wall Street Journal, where former employees of the Theranos laboratory said that most of the analyzes were tested not on Edison’s own equipment, but on traditional Siemens equipment. Due to the fact that a drop of blood is not enough for standard equipment, it is diluted.
There was a scandal, but the head of the laboratory, Holmes, preferred to remain silent. Theranos was criticized by the press. After checking the laboratory, violations were identified.
Elizabeth Holmes admitted her guilt and promised to correct all mistakes in her laboratory. But this has not happened yet.
The company is currently valued at just $800 million, mostly from investors. Upon liquidation Theranos Elizabeth won't get anything. Elizabeth Holmes' success story turned into a failure story.
Elizabeth Holmes is a tall blonde with a messy hairstyle. She is 31 years old and is the world's youngest female billionaire. Holmes is often compared to Steve Jobs. Both spent a lot of time alone as children. Both dropped out of school because they believed there were more important things. Like Jobs, Holmes believed from the very beginning that her company would change the world. Jobs became a billionaire by the age of 40, and Holmes much earlier. Last year, her Theranos project was valued at $9 billion, and she owns more than half of the shares.
Holmes wears black turtlenecks, drinks fresh celery and cucumber, and doesn’t eat meat, because this way the body wants to sleep less. A Jobs biography hangs on her wall, although the turtlenecks are an imitation of Sharon Stone as an elite prostitute in Martin Scorsese's Casino. Holmes has more than a hundred black turtlenecks; in the morning she doesn’t waste time thinking about what to wear.
Forbes and Fortune wrote enthusiastically about Holmes; she is included in most lists of the most influential people planet and in the rankings of billionaires. This young woman does not hide how she achieved this.
Childhood and Stanford
“What I really want is to discover something new, something that mankind has never suspected before,” Holmes wrote to her father when she was nine. She admits that she was a strange child: “I read a ton of books, I was engrossed in Moby Dick.” I still have notebook There’s a design for a time machine that I drew when I was seven.” As a child, Holmes read the biography of her great-great-grandfather Christian Holmes, a surgeon, engineer and inventor. He was born in Denmark in 1857, was the dean of the Cincinnati Medical College in the USA, in this city a hospital is named after him. The ancestor inspired Holmes to connect her life with medicine, but becoming a doctor did not work out - at some point the girl realized that she felt fear when she saw a needle. She later said that this was the main reason for the launch of Theranos, a company that allows you to take a blood test from a finger, rather than from a vein, using a small needle.
When Holmes moved to Palo Alto to attend Stanford, her parents sent her a copy of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations with the message that "life must have a purpose." She entered the Faculty of Chemical Engineering.
During her first year of study, Holmes asked Dean Channing Robertson to allow her entry into the laboratory, where mostly PhD students were working. The head of the department initially resisted, but the student was persistent - every day she waited for him at the door of the laboratory and asked when he would let her inside. Robertson gave up.
Over the summer, Holmes agreed with the Stanford administration that she could take a Chinese class. After that, she begged for an internship at the Genome Institute in Singapore, where she studied SARS, which was then widespread in Asia. She watched how blood tests were taken and thought that this could be done differently, in more modern ways.
Returning to the United States, Holmes got to work. “Elizabeth practically did not get up for five or six days due to desk“,” recalls her mother Noel Holmes. The result of the work was a patent application - a patch that releases a medical substance and monitors changes in the blood. You can attach a chip to it from mobile phone and transmit the data to the doctor. She showed it to Professor Robertson.
At 19, Holmes dropped out of university, invested the money her family had saved for her studies into her company, and began looking for investors. “I knew I would have to talk to at least two hundred people to get even one of them interested. So I didn’t worry about rejections,” Holmes recalls.
Money
The first thing she did was invite Robertson to become her adviser. He had already helped several startups in the field of biotechnology, but their founders were much older than the young Holmes - then she was barely 21 years old. “In every generation, one or two people like her appear,” the professor explained his agreement. By 2005, Holmes had raised about $6 million, which was not enough. She understood: to make a breakthrough, you need to forget about money, the thought of “how to pay your salary next month” should not interfere with work.
To conduct clinical trials, tests were required, Holmes signed contracts with pharmaceutical corporations, including Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, and her company began operating as a division of them. The collaboration added Holmes' status, and more serious investors became interested in her project. By the end of 2010, it raised $92 million. Quiet work on tests began.
At the same time, former military men and officials appeared on the board of directors of Theranos: ex-head of the State Department Henry Kissinger, ex-ministers of defense and generals. The company's proximity to the US military-industrial complex was discussed; Holmes herself explains her choice by the professionalism of these people, although she admits that she uses technologies outside of civilian medicine. She considers the military area “an important area in terms of the potential to save lives.” She feels insulted when she hears that board members are lobbyists.
Strategy
Holmes devotes all his time to company: he rarely has fun, communicates with few people except younger brother, who also works for Theranos. She doesn't date and hasn't taken a vacation in the last ten years.
The company's know-how allows 30 tests to be carried out with just one drop of blood from a finger, using microfluidics and new technology that Holmes keeps secret. It is faster and cheaper than conventional laboratories. " For a long time I couldn’t even tell my wife what I was doing,” Robertson says. Holmes first spoke about her project only after ten years of work. Now the American market is divided between two giants, Quest Diagnostics and Laboratory Corporation of America. But their tests are more expensive than Theranos' tests. For example, cholesterol results from a regular laboratory will cost $17, from Theranos - $2.99.
Holmes said 40% of people don't get a doctor-ordered blood test because they're afraid of needles or can't afford the high cost. Her goal is to have Theranos centers within 5 kilometers of every home in the United States, and then begin global expansion.
Great luck - Holmes managed to attract 50-year-old programmer Sunny Balwani to the company. He worked at Lotus and Microsoft, studied at Stanford and received an MBA from Berkeley. Holmes understood: to analyze blood, you would need to create serious software. In 2009, Balwani became the company's president. “We automated the process from start to finish,” he says.
The company now offers more than 200 tests licensed by the Federal Commission. Theranos has struck a deal with pharmacy giant Walgreens to build thousands of centers, starting in California and Arizona, that offer on-site testing. The result can be seen in the application on the same or next day. Holmes knows that blood can reveal a variety of health conditions - from high cholesterol to cancer - and the testing process should be as painless as buying drugs at the pharmacy near your home.
It creates a platform for the development of preventive medicine. Today, people have the habit of putting off visiting a doctor and often seek help when the disease has gone too far and cannot be cured.
Prospects
Holmes has dedicated a third of her life to the company, but the project is still in its early stages of development. The next 20 years will be enough for her to make the service accessible and widespread. Holmes believes that in life there should be one the main objective, so she’s not going to do anything else. Today she holds 18 patents in the United States and 66 outside the country. Theranos has nearly 1,000 employees and is constantly expanding.
Holmes often faces critics. They say that a blood test does not always indicate a disease; it is impossible to make a diagnosis and prescribe treatment based only on these data. Holmes is not embarrassed by this - she continues to move forward. The company cooperates with the network medical centers Carlos Slim Foundation in Mexico City, which uses Theranos to identify diabetes and other treatable diseases in early articles.
Update: On October 16, The Wall Street Journal published an investigation stating that the Elizabeth Holmes company is deceiving clients and the professional community and does not actually use its developments to obtain analyses.
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