[steven2012]

This is an ignorant viewpoint. It's not just phobia. If a fingerprick blood test were actually possible it would make a huge win for children. One of my kids needs to get his blood tested for lead ( standard blood test for his age). Good luck trying to get him to hold still while he's screaming and fighting and drawing enough blood for a test. It would also be a huge win for premature babies, some of which only have 2oz of blood in their entire system.

The sell of Theranos was that you could do a thousand blood tests on a few drops of blood. If you could go to Safeway and get an accurate fingerprick blood test, then you wouldn't need a trained specialist to draw blood and collect the blood samples anymore. That's a huge win as well.

It seems less and less likely that is actually possible but if it were and you could get reliable and accurate results, it would really make a difference. It's not just people being scared of needles.

[srunni]

> It would also be a huge win for premature babies, some of which only have 2oz of blood in their entire system.

Take a look at Baebies, which is doing exactly this (neonatal screening): http://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article28910089.ht...

The cofounders previously founded Advanced Liquid Logic, a diagnostics company using microfluidics technology developed in a Duke research lab that was subsequently sold to Illumina for $96M in 2013. Baebies is now licensing that technology from Illumina.

Unlike Theranos, their work has been published in peer-reviewed journals. For example, here's a publication from 2004: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2004/lc/b40334...