I’ve heard of PCR before (polymerase chain reaction) where more copies of a DNA sample can be rapidly made. If the problem was that the quantity of blood that Theranos uses is too small, why wasn’t PCR used/ (if it was) why didn’t it work?
Also if I’m completely misunderstanding PCR, if someone could for that too, I’d appreciate it, thank you!
In: 148
Some of it can work. A fingerprick glucometer or haemoglobin can give you the amount of sugar in your blood or how concentrated your blood is based on a drop of blood. A blood gas machine uses not much more than a drop to give you quite a lot of data. These can have issues because a lot of things can affect the blood and the drop that you get might not be reflective of the rest of the blood in your body because of a variety of reasons. If you’re looking for a certain concentration of something in the blood, it can wildly swing from drop to drop if you only collect a small amount, compared to if you collected like 5mL of it.
The limiting factor was going to be how many tests you can get off a sample. They advertised a lot for a small sample which is never going to be physically possible. But if you only need like one or two sets of tests, we already do that with [babies](https://www.bd.com/assets/images/our-products/blood-and-urine-collection/blood-collection/microtainer-blood-tubes_RC_PAS_BC_0616-0001.png), but the machine used to run it is room-sized.
I’ve heard of PCR before (polymerase chain reaction) where more copies of a DNA sample can be rapidly made. If the problem was that the quantity of blood that Theranos uses is too small, why wasn’t PCR used/ (if it was) why didn’t it work?
Also if I’m completely misunderstanding PCR, if someone could for that too, I’d appreciate it, thank you!
In: 148
Some of it can work. A fingerprick glucometer or haemoglobin can give you the amount of sugar in your blood or how concentrated your blood is based on a drop of blood. A blood gas machine uses not much more than a drop to give you quite a lot of data. These can have issues because a lot of things can affect the blood and the drop that you get might not be reflective of the rest of the blood in your body because of a variety of reasons. If you’re looking for a certain concentration of something in the blood, it can wildly swing from drop to drop if you only collect a small amount, compared to if you collected like 5mL of it.
The limiting factor was going to be how many tests you can get off a sample. They advertised a lot for a small sample which is never going to be physically possible. But if you only need like one or two sets of tests, we already do that with [babies](https://www.bd.com/assets/images/our-products/blood-and-urine-collection/blood-collection/microtainer-blood-tubes_RC_PAS_BC_0616-0001.png), but the machine used to run it is room-sized.
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