Original post:
From KQED-San Francisco, July 29:
Hey, try this archetypal nightmare out for size …
Youʼre in a room. Speaking. There are people there — hundreds and hundreds of people. They are not particularly friendly. Actually, they are hostile. You have displeased them. You had made certain unsubstantiated claims about something they know a great deal about. Yes, they are experts. They know exactly how to determine what is truth. And what is …
Then you wake up. Covered in sweat …
This is pretty much the scenario Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes is going to face on Monday in Philadelphia, at the American Association for Clinical Chemistry’s 68th Annual Scientific Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo.
Holmes will present, for the first time and in front of hundreds of lab experts, “reproducibility and correlation data” for the blood-testing technology her company claims to have developed but has never proven to the satisfaction of the scientific community. Holmes will also “share data to demonstrate the precision and accuracy” of its tests..
Those tests can ostensibly be performed using only a small amount of capillary blood from a patient’s finger, instead of the traditional tubes-full taken from a vein....MUCH MORE, with commentary from some of the top people in the clinical laboratory field including one of the heavyweights of laboratory diagnostics Dr. Dr. Eleftherios P. Diamandis (M.D.; PhD) whose thinking was so persuasive that I titled the link, against lawerly advice*, "Theranos: She's Young, She's Rich, Is She A Marketing Huckster?".
But a Wall Street Journal investigation characterized those claims as dubious. Later, a Theranos lab in California was found by its regulator to be so deficient as to represent a threat to patients’ lives. And this month, regulators suspended the lab’s license and banned Holmes from owning, operating or directing a blood-testing lab for two years. (The company has until early September to appeal the government’s decision, and the suspensions don’t take place for the appeal period.)
Both the U.S. Attorneyʼs Office for the Northern District of California and the SEC are investigating, and lawsuits aplenty have been filed.
Now Theranos is typically described with adjectives ranging from “troubled” to “beleaguered” to “disgraced.” And the company, once valued at $9 billion, is in serious danger of becoming permanent shorthand for greed-driven Silicon Valley hubris.
If Holmes has any chance of rebuilding her shattered reputation, and if Theranos is to have any chance of clawing its way back to respectability, it will start in Philadelphia, on Monday. The company has appointed a scientific and medical advisory board, in part to help with “publication and presentation in scientific journals and at scientific meetings.” The board includes several former AACC officials, so one would assume Holmes will, as they say, come correct.
90 Minutes
Still, whatever she presents may or may not be enough to convert hardcore skeptics. The presentation will last 45 minutes, followed by a 45-minute question-and-answer period, according to AACC members helping with the session. Anywhere from 800 to 1,500 people are expected to be in attendance, and the presentation is open to anyone who registers for the conference, including the media, though no questions from reporters will be taken.
Three moderators will ask their own questions as well as questions from the audience, which will be forwarded to the moderators after three other experts come to a consensus as what is most scientifically relevant to the discussion....
Four months before the Wall Street Journal 'broke' the story, I'll have you know.
*just kidding about the lawerly advice, I didn't bother to ask, thinking like a lunatic that lawsuit discovery on this one would be fun.
Recently:
Theranos Is Flopping Like A Dying Fish
Theranos: "What Elizabeth Holmes' 2-Year Ban Really Means"
"Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes Banned From Operating a Lab"
Forbes Revises Estimate Of Theranos Founder Net Worth
And many more. Use the 'search blog' box if interested.
