![]() ![]() “That happens right at the patient’s side, as opposed to having to draw blood and send it to a lab.” i-Stat uses the electrical properties of its targets to get a reading, and other iterations can determine blood oxygenation and clotting ability. “You can run the blood and get results in 10 minutes,” says Narendra Soman, director of R&D for point-of-care diagnostics at Abbott. Too high means you’re having a heart attack low and it’s probably just gas. It’s a handheld unit the size of a universal remote control put a couple drops of blood onto a SD-card-like cartridge that fits into the unit and it’ll tell a physician or EMT whether someone with chest pain has, for example, elevated levels of a protein called troponin-I. ![]() So what’s real? Well, as early as the start of the century there was Abbott, whose i-Stat device is now in a third of all US hospitals. “But none of my analysts considered it to be a real company.” “Theranos was the first time I had people with nothing to do with this industry telling me about it,” says Bruce Carlson, publisher of Kalorama Information, a health care and diagnostics market analysis company. Theranos might not have been unique-overpromises and underdeliveries are as inimical to Silicon Valley as PowerPoint decks on laptops-but real diagnostics companies are making headway. ![]() Published papers and preliminary tests have validated the Maverick’s ability to test for a variety of signals, and the company is now evaluating its use in a handful of San Diego doctors’ offices. Nominally they might reduce health care costs, but more than that they promise new, faster diagnoses and better care. That game has been on since at least 2000, and doctors, patients, and insurers are still clamoring for those tests. But the Theranos debacle didn’t stop their work. Diagnostics start-ups extracted a few lessons: Have actual, peer-reviewed data and, like, don’t lie to investors. A brilliant Wall Street Journal investigation showed that its technology didn’t work this week the Securities and Exchange Commission brought fraud charges against its founder. A couple of years ago, Theranos, a company claiming to be able to almost magically do all sorts of medical tests on a single drop of human blood, fell apart. There’s something familiar about this, you are thinking. Just a little bit of blood, 10 microliters or so, and you can test for 128 different diseases or markers? And it’s being tested right now, in doctors’ offices? Hmm. “Eventually we’ll have a chip with 128 tests at once.” (Not literally.) “We have chips with up to 16 different tests,” says Cary Gunn, Genalyte’s CEO. On the cartridge is a silicon chip carved with antibody-lined channels if any of a range of molecules that signal things like celiac disease are floating around, they stick to the antibodies, changing the way the channel reflects infrared light. It took ten years to build the Maverick, a dorm-fridge-sized box that takes in a cartridge with a little bit of blood-more than a drop but, you know, not a pint, either-and spits out new knowledge. ![]()
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