Someone with a PhD in microbiology explained to me (a layman) why what Theranos was claiming to do was impossible. She said you cannot test only a single drop of blood for certain things because what you are looking for literally may not be there. You need a full vial of blood to have a reliable chance of finding many things.
1. Is this simple but clear explanation basically correct?
2. If so, how could Theranos hoodwink investors for so long when possibly *millions* of well-educated people around the world knew that what they were claiming to do made no sense?
In: Biology
>Is this simple but clear explanation basically correct?
Not really.
An irony from all this is that scientific and commercial research into blood “microsampling” has intensified in part due to Theranos, with many promising results.
From [Nature](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-022-01242-0):
>**Advances in technology and changes to healthcare during the pandemic may finally realize the vision of patient-centric blood testing espoused by disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes.**
>[…] four years after Theranos’s lights went out, advances in blood analysis — including volumetric adsorptive microsampling (VAM), integrated point-of-care (POC) devices, wearables and telemedicine — are reaching an inflection point that could make Holmes’s fantasy attainable.
From [Stanford](https://systemx.stanford.edu/news/2023-01-20-000000/%E2%80%98theranos-works%E2%80%99-stanford-researchers-say-they%E2%80%99ve-measured-thousands):
>‘Theranos that works’: Stanford researchers say they’ve measured thousands of molecules from a single drop of blood
>Now, in a research paper published Thursday, Stanford researchers say they’ve accomplished what Theranos was unable to do: they’ve developed a new approach that can measure thousands of molecules with about one drop of blood. […]
>**It’s a bold claim, but one that Stanford medicine professor John Ioanndis, who was one of the first to publicly question Theranos in a column for the Journal of American Medicine Association, says has scientific backing**. Ioanndis is not affiliated with Snyder’s study.
Recent paper [from Australia](https://www.medicalrepublic.com.au/what-if-theranos-was-real/105514):
>Anyway, the point of this mini-rant is that just this month, 20 years after the founding of Theranos, [a paper has been published](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.analchem.3c05152) announcing the feasibility of using a capillary microsample to measure more than 100 lipoproteins and other parameters using metabolic phenotyping, with results on par with venous sampling.
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