FDA approves Theranos test for HSV-1 | Hacker News Reader

FDA approves Theranos test for HSV-1

fortune.com

40 pointspak24 comments

One guess I have about theranos , is that they are going to radically change healthcare in Africa. Why ?

Well let's start with the fact that the main thing preventing labs-on-chip devices transforming Africa today is business reasons - its just not seen as a good investment by western companies.

But what's unique about theranos is that it is owned by Holmes ,which seems very idealistic(as her main motivation here ) , and her father worked for years helping African healthcare .

So I think Holmes will use the strong business it will build in the west to create and extremely low cost African healthcare .That also explains why she has advisors like foreign state secretary and why bill gates is very impressed with her.

Yeah, I suppose commodisation of services has the advantage that the benefits tricle down easier to developing economies as boxed solutions require less infrastructure and human capital. Everybody wins.

I think it's more than commodification. My guess is that price in the west would be much higher than in africa(where products will be sold at cost) - but still relatively low, mainly because investors want profits. And whole in whole it's the moral thing to do, especially with the fact the healthcare quality in the west will increase.

As a general note, i've seen research talking about prices of 0.01 CENTS PER TEST for some lab-ob-a-chip methods.

The biggest problem with mass testing are the false positives. When you're testing 100 million people even a low false positive rate of 0.1% will still mean that 100 000 people will think they're sick when they're not. I once even saw an example where they calculated that when everybody did an HIV test most positives actually would be false positives.

All that hype for a microfluidic sandwich ELISA?

For those of us that are more conversant in microservice golang APIs... explain?

It's the kind of biochemical assay that pregnancy tests use, so not exactly cutting edge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELISA#Sandwich_ELISA

Furthermore, certain types of ELISA have been in use in clinics and hospitals for many years ... but they have always required venous sticks and a lot more blood. ELISA has also historically been expensive due to the amount of antibody required--the microfluidics approach is much cheaper in this regard.

Microfluidic device open lots of possibilities in health care(and might bring some of the dynamics of moore's law and the computer industry to health care). Although not new, they are rarely used for routine blood tests.

So anybody who bring to healthcare, especially at this price point, and at this comfort and offering the ability to order your own tests, holds lots of potential.

Agreed. I was expecting something revolutionary in the report linked from the article. I'm pretty shocked that a technique from the 1970's is only now "disrupting" the medical laboratory industry. I'm not saying that this isn't impressive, just that it seems it should have been done a long time ago!

I didn't realize that Walgreens is already doing Theranos tests.

http://www.walgreens.com/storelocator/find.jsp

What tests do they perform? Is this something that we should be doing yearly?

[update] fixed typo

Walgreens and Walmart are two different companies, despite the similarity of their names.

Walgreens had $76b in revenues last year and was founded in 1901. Walmart wasn't founded until 1962, but had $485b in revenue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walgreens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart

Fixed the typo. I know the difference. I walk by Walgreens daily, but never shop there.

I was curious too so I took a look at their website. It looks like they list all their tests and the price for them. This seems rather transparent of them. Not sure if Walgreens does all of these.

https://www.theranos.com/test-menu

What the heck, I posted this exact same link like 12 hours ago.

Entrepreneurs know not to bitch like this. Not only the idea is important, timing is important. The market was not ready for your idea 12 hours ago. Also luck plays a role. The right people did not see your post at the right time to upvote it.

I'd love to see a postmortem of why the original post failed. It would be useful for future posters. Honestly, we've all been there, even though you always feel like you have to tell people you're "killin' it!" with your HN submissions.

There was a discussion about the best timing to post on HN a couple of years ago :

http://silverman.svbtle.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-hacker-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4757790

And also who said it was irrelevant:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9426040

http://antontarasenko.com/2015/04/23/best-time-to-post-its-i...

personjerry is probably confused because if you submit a duplicate link on HN it generally just adds an upvote to the previous submission. Thus "exact same link".

As mentioned below, though, it's not exactly the same: https vs. http.

Yep, this is what I was saying. Thanks!

To answer why, the links are different:

You posted the https version

This one is http

This happens all the time.

Unfortunately not enough people traffic the new page to make hn a fair arbiter of content quality. If you don't like it spend some time on https://news.ycombinator.com/newest upvoting content you like.

I started reading this article and ended up reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius... totally forgot about the original article

Reply on news.ycombinator.com