Why did Theranos insist on using 'a single drop of blood.' Why not be able to run a normal blood sample through an unprecedentedly compact form factor testing unit. Wouldn't that be good enough?
(a) Holmes seemed to be obsessed with this due to a personal phobia of venous blood draws (personal quirks are a surprisingly common driver of weird decisions in Silicon Valley-ish companies; the fact that small low capacity vehicles are used in Boring Company tunnels seems to be down to Musk's phobia of public transport, for instance).
(b) The original idea was that a patient would have one of these things _in their house_; a patient can't reasonably do a venous blood draw on themselves, but they can do a finger prick. There are some real working tests that work this way for this reason; HIV self-tests are normally finger-prick tests, say.
But by the time they'd repositioned as "the machines are in a pharmacy, or maybe a central lab", yeah, it made no sense anymore.
I totally agree with this, and I'm still sad that what Theranos was planning to do with Walgreens was canned.
I mean, if I could walk into a Walgreens, choose from a menu of lots of different tests at transparent, low prices (IIRC a lot of their prices were great), get a normal, standard venous blood draw, and then have that draw analyzed while I finishes shopping at Walgreens so I could get my results in 15-20 minutes, I think that would be a fantastic experience.
Is there some reason the above is not possible or viable?
(b) The original idea was that a patient would have one of these things _in their house_; a patient can't reasonably do a venous blood draw on themselves, but they can do a finger prick. There are some real working tests that work this way for this reason; HIV self-tests are normally finger-prick tests, say.
But by the time they'd repositioned as "the machines are in a pharmacy, or maybe a central lab", yeah, it made no sense anymore.