I think there might be an incentive for money eyed businessmen to keep prices for these kind of products low. The more people have a verified decease, the more you can sell specific (expensive) cures to. As opposed to not knowing the treatment they need or people just living with the symptoms because they can't even afford a diagnose. Making people healthy doesn't bring you money. Keeping sick people alive (albiet in better health than before) does.
How is this device anything like Theranos? Theranos promised a world with less of a need for lab testing and claimed to empower individuals to analyze their own vital statistics. This is a product for disease detection in labs. They are more of a thematic contradiction of one another than anything else.
Theranos did publish studies, they just weren't very good. They also did quite a lot of basic research. It just, also, wasn't very good. However, Theranos had lots of extremely qualified people attesting to the quality of their work, especially early on.
Now, i'm not saying this company isn't legit, or is like Theranos. But it is hard to tell from the outside, and it's important to remember that when making comparisons.
For good or bad, any move in this space is going to draw inevitable comparisons to theranos. Yes this current example is based on a proof of concept, but at some point any research has to hit the product phase, and that is especially when theranos blowback will produce both criticism and scrutiny.
Theranos is exactly what I thought of as soon as I saw this.
They’re not claiming to do it with only a “nano-tainer“ of blood, or to do a bunch of the level sensing things (cholesterol, blood sugar, PSA, etc) that Theranos promised. It’s also not as small as a package of reagents.
But it looks like this works the way Theranos CLAIMED their tech worked, only in single use form without the machine to do some of the work for you.
But the field seem to have some problem in crossing over to "disruptive" commercial products. Not sure why.