Theranos Reaches Settlement with Walgreens | Hacker News Reader

Theranos Reaches Settlement with Walgreens

news.theranos.com

88 pointskqr243 comments

I suspect we are going to see Theranos pivot to becoming a conventional medical technology company, probably focusing on lab tech for blood work analysis etc. They are likely to disappear from public consciousness until we hear about an acquisition by a Siemens type company.

They got here through hype, smoke and mirrors, but they now have the capital, social network and core organizational processes in place to do this and it is a rational path to recouping time and $ investments from everyone involved.

However it will be difficult/impossible for this to pivot to happen without Elizabeth Holmes' resignation.

Do you know if any of their patents are valuable? I don't know enough about the field to tell.

But they've been at this since 2003 and have pages of patents, http://patents.justia.com/assignee/theranos-inc

It'd be surprising if there was nothing of value.

The main website mentions something about the "minilab", here's video which shows the various components housed inside the Theranos minilab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWflFijPEpc

A material handling robot, a camera, a centrifuge, a cytometer, etc etc.... it's like a really neat Swiss army toy that would probably be great in the hands of researchers, provided that this hardware has a somewhat open API. Presuming that it more or less works, it's kind of cool, and lots of labs (both proper medical and research labs) would probably be interested in buying such a thing and would gladly pay a good few thousand bucks for it.

It looks like a bunch of stuff put inside a box ... in a render. It doesn't look like any development beyond "we need to show a product idea" went into it.

Nobody will ever buy anything from them. Nobody should.

Really? Does it really seriously look like a render? As it happens _I_ sometimes create renders for my 9-5 of medical equipment (in solidworks and c4d), these Theranos minilab images look like photographs to me, not renders.

> Nobody will ever buy anything from them. Nobody should.

Oh, trust me, a lot of people will buy things like minilab if it's marketed well, there's a lot of money for these things. A common price for any medical research hardware of the serious kind is tens of thousands (my lab got a confocal microscope only recently for $200k; our sister lab bought a diamond turning machine for about 2 million to create glass lens).

I design custom instruments for startups and labs. No one will buy anything related to Theranos. No one wants a bunch of random parts in a custom box. Why the hell would anyone put a centrifuge or a thermocycler adjacent to an expensive precision instrument like a flow cytometer?

Wow. How can it possibly be worth $2M to make glass lenses? Is this for eyeglasses?

Making lens for optical experiment setups, with machines like these: http://www.nanotechsys.com/

> would gladly pay a good few thousand bucks for it.

A minilab will cost way more than that...just the centrifuge component cost is in the thousands. A lab already has this type of equipment...the expected use is for point of care...but which doctor's office will want to spend $50k++ (plus ongoing reagent costs etc.) for results that will be less accurate than from a regular lab? So maybe military usage? In any case, they have not released any update at all on it for a year.

I used to work selling and maintaining instruments primarily to physician's offices. They were all 50k+. It depends on the tests being run, and what type of insurances the patients have. If they have good insurance that doesn't require the blood sent out to Quest or other mega lab company, they can make decent money on specialty chemistry tests.

And yes, these doctors would order absolutely everything they can bill for as it was going in their pocket. Homocystine, and Vitamin D are 2 high reimbursement tests they liked a lot.

However as I always said about Theranos they have no technology that could possibly work for a wide variety of analytes, and this is already a very competitive market in both equipment and labs. They still don't have a chance. I have no idea how people were so fooled by this. A 40+ billion dollar long existing industry that relies on heavily regulated hard science is not going to be disrupted by a college dropout.

>now have the capital, social network and core organizational processes in place to do this and it is a rational path to recouping time and $ investments from everyone involved

There is no indication of this. Why would you suggest that a proven and humiliated scam company has these capabilities?

* Capital: https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2016/10/07/why-thera...

Theranos raised $750 million, including $633 million last year.

* Social Network: Theranos raised money from a wide range of influential investors who can support the company's efforts to secure new customers and who stand to lose to varying degrees if instead Theranos completely folds, even if it returns the remaining balance of funds raised.

* Core organizational processes: the company still has hundreds of employees on the payroll, most of whom are qualified professionals in this field. It is not trivial to recruit and bring together an organization like that. It's unlikely that most of those hundreds of people were directly involved in the shenanigans of the company.

I think those are 3 assets the company would use towards a pivot like I described. But you can't do it without removing the leader who got them here.

:)))

There is damaged and there is zombie state. I suspect Theranos is in the zombie state, too wealthy to fold but it is really no longer alive. Damage you can recover from Theranos as a brand is so tainted that no other company with a successful line of medical devices will ever want to be associated with them for fear of getting contaminated by proximity, and no customers will sign on for fear of being used as a stooge in the next round of fraud.

Any acquisition of Theranos will be after the book is closed and the assets are sold off. People working there will likely have a big hole in their resume's that they'd rather not talk about.

From John Carreyou on June 22:

https://twitter.com/JohnCarreyrou/status/877499269191782402

>Theranos burning $10 mln a month, will have less than $30 mln left after Walgreens settlement. You do the math...

Liquidating office equipment:

https://twitter.com/startuplqdtr/status/873385484860313600

Is @startuplqdtr a Twitter parody site?

>People working there will likely have a big hole in their resume's that they'd rather not talk about.

Where's the line on this? Is Enron a hole on the resume? How about Arthur Andersen? Do companies like Uber make the mix?

I live in Houston. My general impression is that for a good long while, Enron was indeed sort of a hole in the resume for a lot of folks. (I never worked there nor represented them.)

Enron definite yes, AA to the point where people pretend that they never worked there even if you knew them back then. Uber not yet, but maybe one day.

They are currently getting sued by their investors. They'll be bankrupt completely within a year.

Why not just pull your cash and invest in some other med tech company? What is their track record for successful product development?

Theranos is clearly a failure. 14 years of wasting investors money, 700million (?) down the drain, nothing to show for it except bad publicity, FBI and FDA investigations and major compliance issues.

At what point do investors pull the plug / fire CEO and move on?

686.3million in 9 rounds (!!) to be exact. this is like a bad soap opera.

they were seeking to raise additional 200million. These VCs are insane.

IF (!!!) this ever worked they would be - 1billion before shipping any product. Whoever puts anymore money into this should ask for at this point majority of the equity no questions asked.

I think Color was worse, no?

(Edit: actually no, they raised "only" 41Mi)

It's not clear that investors _can_ fire Holmes.

They probably can't, or it would have happened by now.

I'm guessing when all claims from creditors/investors have been settled. Liquidation with the remaining capital divided up among them.

So, for someone not following this particularly closely -- what is next for Theranos?

I know settling with Walgreens was a big goal of theirs, but I don't remember if that was the end of their legal troubles. Similarly, they mention their investors, which makes me wonder if they have issues on that front as well. (eg, did they lie when they sold shares?)

Even after the settlement though, they probably have a huge pile of cash -- and at least some investors are willing to let them try something with it.

Does their technology actually work, or will it soon? Doesn't their future depend on shipping what they promised?

That's the problem - there is no technology.

Luckily for Theranos there is already an decent sized market for pseudo-medicine based around samples so tiny they couldn't possibly work -- homeopathy.

If the investors aren't shutting down Theranos, then there is a possibility their due diligence on Holmes' patents held out hope of patent trolling someone with deep pockets in the future, or some other similar hope pinned upon those patents. My limited layman's understanding of their microfluidics-based claims is they violated currently-known assaying principles. Hope someone with deeper knowledge about this can pipe in, I've only seen some rants from claimed clinicians when they first announced way back, with terms that went way over my head, and they summed up the rant's TL;DR as, if she really figured it out, she'd be publishing and collecting a Nobel or two, as she would've upended a century of what we believe is statistically possible.

However, if instead of using their "nanotainer", a fancy name for a very small blood sample container, some future microfluidics implementation used in vivo implanted chips, and can build up a sampling profile over time say, and some of her patents stand smack in the road of that deployment, then they could recoup some of their money.

Last time I looked, their patents were vague to the point of being worthless.

Apparently, no parent is vague enough for trolling. But maybe that is getting harder now with the recent decisions about jurisdiction.

There were a number of patents assigned this year. Surprisingly many, for a company in seemingly so much trouble [1]; this display makes it easier to see the assignment dates [2]. Perhaps this is staying the hand of the investors for now, and they're performing some independent due diligence.

[1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...

[2] http://patents.justia.com/assignee/theranos-inc

Unrelated, but that website had around 100 words of actual article, and a bunch of unnecessary other information. The date, for example, was repeated twice, and there was a link to Theranos's website (not to mention a short "about" paragraph) on their own website.

Probably because this is a public relations article, they expect it to be copied a lot.

It's a press release. The expectation is that this will get picked up and placed into a number of different sources.

They don't expect a particularly high volume of traffic visiting this page directly.

That's exactly how a typical English press release is supposed to be written, including the date (the top date appears to be from Theranos' CMS and the other one is the press release byline). Here's another example, a Caesars press release from today and the Bollinger release that made HN the other day:

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/english-releases/mar...

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bollinger-motors-rev...

Notice the "About" graf which closes both of them. Those are standard, and joint press releases will usually have one for each party; the idea is to provide context for a reporter who is handed the press release, and the practice predates the Web and Wikipedia.

How are they still in existence?

Personal connections of the current CEO. "Old boys club" fell head over heels for her.

"""One of her earliest investors, Timothy Draper, was an old neighbor from childhood. Another, Don Lucas, was the friend of her father's college classmate. (Lucas brought on Oracle founder Lawrence Ellison, according to The Times.)

Holmes' father's family "moved in powerful circles," and he himself is a longtime public servant who held "a number of senior government positions in Washington," Abelson and Creswell report. Her mother was a congressional aide.

But despite those Washington connections, The Times report suggests that Theranos' powerful board — which includes two former senators and two former Secretaries of State — is at least in large part a credit to Holmes' power of persuasion.

According to the Times, she met George P. Schultz, Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State and one of the company's first high-powered board members, at a conference."""

http://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-elizabeth-holmes-new...

When I first read this I thought it said "Thanos Reaches Settlement with Walgreens". :)

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