Skip to Content

Theranos Gets (Another) Bad Lab Report

U.S. regulators add to the pressure on a struggling blood-testing startup.
January 25, 2016

Updated January 27, 2016, at 6:01 p.m.

The Wall Street Journal has more bad news about Theranos, the blood-testing startup that was once a Silicon Valley darling valued at $9 billion. The Journal reported today that laboratory violations at Theranos would put patients in “immediate jeopardy,” and disqualify the company from participating in the Medicare program.

On Monday, federal health inspectors found “serious deficiencies” at a Theranos lab. It’s not clear what those problems are, though the Journal says the issues are “far more severe” than ones detected in an inspection of the same laboratory in 2013. This comes after the Journal reported in October that Theranos was not yet able—as it claimed—to perform a wide range of lab tests on a pinprick-sized sample of blood.

Because Theranos has raised more than $400 million and made headlines for its eye-popping valuation, its stumbles have been a source of schadenfreude in Silicon Valley. But it would be a shame if its struggles obscured the fact that blood tests in general are justifiably hot right now: they can be used to glean remarkable new insights, even about tumors or other problems that show up only in minuscule amounts. That development won’t be derailed even if Theranos falls apart.

(Source: Wall Street Journal)

Keep Reading

Most Popular

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like.

New large language models will transform many jobs. Whether they will lead to widespread prosperity or not is up to us.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

GPT-4 is bigger and better than ChatGPT—but OpenAI won’t say why

We got a first look at the much-anticipated big new language model from OpenAI. But this time how it works is even more deeply under wraps.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.