Theranos

Company Background
Theranos which derived from the word “therapy” and “diagnosis” was a privately
held health technology corporation based on America. It was initially touted as a
breakthrough technology company, with claims to have revolutionized blood testing.
The company offers more than 240 tests, ranging from cholesterol to cancer that
requires only a very small amounts of blood, such as from a finger prick and could be
performed using small automated devices the company had developed within just a
short period of time compared to the traditional blood testing that may take longer hours
up to several days to get the results. Holmes believes that providing faster, more
convenient, and cheaper access to lab tests will transform preventive medicine. At
Theranos, they never charges more than half the rate set by Medicare for blood tests
which is really way cheaper. For an instance, a test for HIV which cost more than $80,
at Theranos, they only charges $16.56.
The company was founded in 2003 when Elizabeth Holmes is just 19 years old. In 2013
and 2014, Theranos soared in valuation that raised more than US$700 million from
venture capitalists and private investors, resulting in a $10 billion valuation at its peak.
Theranos headquarter was in Palo Alto, California and had laboratories in Newark,
California and Scottsdale, Arizona.

Elizabeth Anne Holmes was an American businesswoman who was born February 3,

1984 in Washington, D.C. She was the founder and CEO of Theranos, a health
technology company that aims to revolutionized blood testing.
In 2002, she attended Stanford's School of Engineering, where she took chemical
engineering. Then she worked as a student researcher and a laboratory assistant in
the School of Engineering. By the time she got in in Stanford, Holmes knew she wanted
to devote her life working in on health care. At Stanford, she'd been exploring lab-on-a-
chip technology, which allows diverse results to be extracted from a minuscule amount
of liquid on a microchip. She became a “president’s scholar” during her freshman year
which came with a $3,000 allowance for her research project. After the end of her
freshman year, during summer, Holmes started working in a laboratory at the Genome
Institute of Singapore and tested for severe acute respiratory syndrome
coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) by collecting blood samples with syringes.
In 2003, she then filed her first patent application for a “medical device for analyte
monitoring and drug delivery” a wearable drug-delivery patch that would administer
medication, monitor’s patients’ blood, adjust the dosage needed and update doctors
wirelessly.
In March 2004, she dropped out of Stanford's School of Engineering and used her
tuition money as her capital fund for a consumer healthcare technology company.
Holmes named her company “Real-Time Cures” and it is located in Palo Alto, California
to "democratize healthcare" she said. According to Holmes, her fear of needles is what
drives her to perform blood tests by only using a small amounts of blood. When Holmes
initially pitched this idea of "vast amounts of data from a few droplets of blood derived
from the tip of a finger" to her medicine professor at Stanford, Phyllis Gardner, he
responded with "I don't think your idea is going to work", explaining how it was
impossible to accomplish despite Holmes claiming that it could be done. Aside from
Gardner, several other expert medical professors told Holmes the same exact
thing. However, Holmes did not allow their opinions to stop her from believing that it was
possible. Later on, she succeeded in getting her advisor and dean at the School of
Engineering, Channing Robertson, to back up her idea.