How A Life-Changing Blood Tester Turned Out To Be A Lie

In 2012, two major supermarket chains in the United States invested hundreds of millions of pounds as part of a plan to revolutionise their in-store clinics and enable them to provide an effective home pharmacy service for millions of their customers.

The centrepiece was set to be a blood testing unit the size of a games console that was described as much of a game changer for the field of diagnosis as the iPhone had been to the mobile phone and technology world at large.

It was made by a promising medical technology startup featured in a raft of publications and run by a young CEO who through this company became the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.

This company was known as Theranos, its CEO Elizabeth Holmes and its entire foundation were built on lies that caused harm to vulnerable people and led to her conviction on fraud charges.

With a lifelong fear of needles, Ms Holmes’s plan was to create a blood tester that was more affordable, needed less blood and could make blood diagnosis more easily accessible.

This led to the “nanotainer”, famously seen in posters for the product and the CEO, and a blood testing machine that was initially known as the MiniLab before later being renamed the Edison, allegedly based on the quote that failure is discovering thousands of ways an idea will not work.

This mentality would lead to the creation of Theranos after her medicine professor at Stanford University said that she thought her idea could work in 2003.

The problems were multiple, fundamental and with current technology almost completely unsolvable. She wanted to make a miniature blood testing unit that could carry out a range of diagnostic tests using just a drop of blood.

The problem was that to do that much testing with such a small sample requires heavy dilution of the blood. The reason why so much blood is taken is that it is inherently altered during the testing process and cannot be reused.

As well as this, finger blood, as was advertised to be the selling point, is prone to contamination, to the point that in one testing sample, the potassium level was so high that the only way it could be accurate is if the patient was dead.

This was compounded by the machine itself being too small, causing heat dissipation issues that affected the results even more.

The solution for Ms Holmes was to lie about the results, either by lying about the efficacy of the machines or surreptitiously using other blood testing machines in a morbid example of faking it until you make it.

The most concerning example of this was a testing facility in Newark that was testing people for the correct dose of warfarin, a blood-thinning drug that can have life-threatening side effects if an incorrect dose is given.

Theranos was shut down in 2018 as both Ms Holmes and her partner Sunny Balwani were indicted on fraud charges. Both were found guilty in late 2022.

Blood testing units are typically exceptionally large and require large samples of blood because this is the best way for them to function, and until a rapid upgrade in technology, this will likely be the way they will work for a long time.