Theranos may have been outright fraud but their technical claims never seemed that outlandish. There are many legitimate companies/academic labs working on similar bloodtests and even brining more limited versions to market.
There timing was excellent too. I actually remember thinking a few years ago that all one would need to do to design something like the theranos product is run enough blood samples through a good mass spec and load the date into map reduce. But based on research since then "enough" turns out to be a whole lot.
And there are also scientists who think that ideas like that are ridiculous and biomarkers for certain diseases (like early stage cancer) will never be findable in blood. And many of them are vocal about the fact. But since there are experts on both sides that isn't a clear indictment of the idea.
It is also worth noting that the "crisis of reproducibility" is bad enough in bio that I wouldn't haven been surprised if Theranos had very promising early results that didn't pan out. Thats happened to a lot of people.
Personally I fully believe we'll see a Theranos like product in the next 20 years around the time protein sequencing and mass spectrometry tech gets cheap enough to do studies with on ~millions of people instead of ~thousands.
There timing was excellent too. I actually remember thinking a few years ago that all one would need to do to design something like the theranos product is run enough blood samples through a good mass spec and load the date into map reduce. But based on research since then "enough" turns out to be a whole lot.
And there are also scientists who think that ideas like that are ridiculous and biomarkers for certain diseases (like early stage cancer) will never be findable in blood. And many of them are vocal about the fact. But since there are experts on both sides that isn't a clear indictment of the idea.
It is also worth noting that the "crisis of reproducibility" is bad enough in bio that I wouldn't haven been surprised if Theranos had very promising early results that didn't pan out. Thats happened to a lot of people.
Personally I fully believe we'll see a Theranos like product in the next 20 years around the time protein sequencing and mass spectrometry tech gets cheap enough to do studies with on ~millions of people instead of ~thousands.