We need open-source DIYbio hardware and software for the same reasons as open-source security. This is a good device candidate for development by indie hackers, so that the resulting data samples and analysis are offline-first, with later optional aggregation under user consent.
This is a pretty cool idea, with a technique that is both simple and proven. It's a mechanical test so they're basically coming up with an efficient way to do ancient medicine. Warfarin is almost free, but your diet and health changes can impact it's clotting impact, and changing your dose is like steering a cruise ship: long lags between inputs and final results. I've had to use a fast-acting injectable while getting into my clotting range which can take almost a week at $100 per daily shot. This also involved going to a clinic daily, then waiting for my doctor to get the results and phone me up, just to change my warfarin dose. You then go happily on your way but need to test regularly to stay in the desired range.
The quality of life impact for millions of people could be enormous. Kudos!
> This also involved going to a clinic daily, then waiting for my doctor to get the results and phone me up, just to change my warfarin dose.
Have you considered getting a PT/INR monitor? They're not cheap, but even just going to a clinic that has one will mean that you get your result very quickly.
> Warfarin is almost free, but your diet and health changes can impact it's clotting impact, and changing your dose is like steering a cruise ship: long lags between inputs and final results.
In the UK, edoxaban has more or less replaced Warfarin, and has far fewer side effects or need for monitoring (or so says my GP).
It really depends on why you need anticoagulants to begin with.
I have mechanical bits in my ticker and so I’ll pretty much the last cohort to be able to jump, but your post prompted me to read up on Edoxaban and I’m apprehensively exited :)
> It really depends on why you need anticoagulants to begin with.
Of course. I have atrial fibrillation and it is more or less standard medication for that in the UK (along with god knows how much other stuff). My (late) Dad had the same problems as me, and he was never confident he had taken the right amount of warfarin. But if you have heart valves, stents or whatever, or indeed anything, please don't take this as medical advice - IANAD.
The concept isn't new [1] but the low budget implementation is certainly quite clever. More advanced machines of this type are already in widespread use. The article makes it sound like it's a completely new concept.
I find these type of inventions so exciting, taking a consumer device and modifying it for medical purposes. We need more of this type of innovative thinking in the medical field.
I used to work in medical and biotech device development. There are very much two sides to the the development of a medical device, the scientific development and the commercial device. Far to regularly when I was working in the field (particularly diagnostics) researchers would see some positive early results, get some VC money and jump straight in to developing a snazzy device to do it before completely validating their science. They would get distracted by wanting to make a handheld touch screen thing, or a beautifully styled bench top device.
In the 7 years I worked in medical/biotech development only a small portion of the projects I worked on made it to market and then to success. The ones that did, properly validated their science early in the process and kept thing simple and inexpensive.
There’s no need to make this an app on a smartphone. For mere dollars we can build this out of off the shelf components, as a small single purpose device. Make it Bluetooth compatible if you want.
Until you get killed by a hacker, or your device manufacturer silently changes camera firmware to include shitty AI updates to your computational photography device and breaks the app etc. I'll buy the actual medical device, thank you.
I’m sure they’ve thought about it, but I’m also curious about the risk of coupling an OTC medical device to the implementation details of a smartphone. Apple never intended the iPhone’s haptics or camera to be used this way, and could change them with a soft update at any time. Seems risky to trust the results without owning the supply chain or at least having guarantees.
It doesn't take much of a smart phone, which many already have though. I'd rather buy someone a smart phone for this purpose than a custom, one-off testing device.
Her only problem was that she fell off the runway before she had a chance to take off. Some engineers I spoke with told me she was 2 years before her big breakthru. At the end of the day no difference between Holmes being over-promising on blood testing, and Musk over-promising with your Tesla being a robotaxi that makes you $30,000 profit a year, by driving fully autonomously inside a vast network of underground 3D tunnels at speeds of 150 mph.
Holmes wasn't just making lofty promises about the future capabilities of her technology, she was lying about its current capabilities to investors and using unreliable diagnostic tools to provide patients with test results that were frequently wrong - real patients experienced real harm as a result.
The better analogy would be Musk indiscriminately enabling full self-driving in every Model 3, claiming its Level 5 as is, and encouraging drivers to sit in the back with a blindfold on.
Did these "some engineers" get their degree from a crackerjack box?
Holmes was always full of shit, and a "big breakthru" in this area is impossible, as there is ample evidence that capillary blood at these volumes is simply not homogeneous enough to give accurate results for quantitative tests.
Impossible with todays technology. When Musk was initially pitching electric car, everyone was laughing because back then the batteries density made it impossible for battery to be lightweight enough to be carried in a normal sized car. And look where we are today...
Let's revisit Holmes claims in 15 years. Unless you want to argue that there will never be any progress made in terms of blood tests???
> everyone was laughing because back then the batteries density made it impossible for battery to be lightweight enough to be carried in a normal sized car.
That's simply untrue. The issue was always recognized to be economic, not a physical impossibility issue. There were a bunch of (crappy) electric cars in the 90s.
With respect to Theranos, impossible as in it is physically impossible, because of the non-homogeneity of capillary blood. It simply doesn't matter how good your blood test is, if you are doing a quantitative test, for many types of tests you can simply not get good enough accuracy doing a finger prick test.
With respect to Theranos, impossible as in it is physically impossible, because of the non-homogeneity of capillary blood. It simply doesn't matter how good your blood test is, if you are doing a quantitative test, for many types of tests you can simply not get good enough accuracy doing a finger prick test.
The crazy thing is, you don't have to consult biomedical engineers or pore over leading-edge research papers to discover this. You just need to ask almost any med tech with a modicum of experience with blood tests. They will tell you, in no uncertain terms, that Blood Does Not Work That Way.
I will never understand the lack of due diligence performed by the Theranos investors. There couldn't possibly have been any due diligence at all. It's very hard to avoid slipping into victim-blaming mode in any conversation about this company.
Because of injustice that happened to Holmes (mostly because she is a woman; man promising all kind of crap never delivering have been given pass many times before - see Musk track record for reference), nobody is going to touch blood testing for a very long time. Hence 15 years.
There is a difference between promising all sorts of stuff and making claims about what is already fact. Holmes ran afoul of the latter. Her claim was not that the machines will work. She could have freely made that claim. She fraudulently claimed that the machines did work.
That's a thing nowadays. Trevor Noah talked about this type of biased thinking recently. While it is true there may be a machine in the future that can do what Holmes claimed, there are still people who worked at the company who claimed it was impossible due to our current understanding of the laws of physics.
> While it is true there may be a machine in the future that can do what Holmes claimed
No, there won't. I feel the need to keep repeating this because for some reason many people seem to conflate "it is not possible with current technology" with "it is a physical impossibility". Doing accurate quantitative blood tests with a finger prick is a physical impossibility.
All that said, one thing that made me especially mad about Theranos is that a lot of their ideas, e.g. one small, portable machine that can run tons of tests; simplified, consumer-accessible pricing; access at neighborhood pharmacies, etc., had a ton of value even if accomplished with venous blood draws. But instead Holmes' delusions of grandeur forced her to hang everything on the fraudulent, and impossible, "must be done with a finger prick" idea.
I said may be. What is impossible is to negate a "maybe". While there may be physical limitation now, that doesn't mean there will be later. New understandings of physics may change that, as would new technology that wouldn't normally be researched along a given path to an idea or need (like a very small machine operating on very small samples). For example, we may find a way to use neutrinos to detect things we didn't know we could detect before, because someone theorized that doing XYZ with neutrenos allows us to detect them.
That "discovery" (hypothetical) could then be repurposed to build a small machine that does what Holmes thought it could. Not that she thought about stuff like that - she was designing their stupid building instead.
The point I was making was that not knowing now and then saying will will know later at which point "someone becomes right" is a biased way of thinking. My point was not to say there will or won't be, which is why I used "may be".
> Some engineers I spoke with told me she was 2 years before her big breakthru.
That's pretty gullible given her history to date. 2 years before a breakthrough spells 'never', that's exactly how the rest of the investors got bilked.
> At the end of the day no difference between Holmes being over-promising on blood testing, and Musk over-promising with your Tesla being a robotaxi that makes you $30,000 profit a year, by driving fully autonomously inside a vast network of underground 3D tunnels at speeds of 150 mph.
There's a difference, Musk is wealthy and has mostly swindled consumers and retail investors, while Holmes wasn't wealthy and mainly swindled the wealthy.
