By Peter Day, California
Elizarbeth Holmes is woth $4.5bn (£2.7bn).Monitoring what's going on in your body has gripped California's
Silicon Valley like a mania.
Enthusiasts wear two or three wrist bands to keep an eye on their blood
pressure 24 hours a day. They use sensors to tell them how many paces they have taken - the
recommended daily rate is currently 10,000, I think.
That's about five
miles.
And up and down the valley, new companies are rushing to get a piece of
the action. They are matching body measuring devices to the smartphone,
to produce a torrent of data that may or may not be useful to doctors and
specialists, if they have the time to deal with it. There are dozens of such
entrepreneurial start-ups, maybe hundreds.
It is happening because only very recently have people become
permanently connected to the internet in this always-on, display-rich way.
Mobile technology is seemingly reordering our relationship with
ourselves, as well as the outside world.
After you've liked or friended a person, you may as well include your own
body in your digital network.
“The beginning was what I could do to make a change in the world” said Holmes.
Meanwhile, on a corner of the Stanford University campus where
Facebook once had its office, Elizabeth Holmes is working away at a
health monitoring project that has already taken up 11 years of her life.
Her company Theranos is the antithesis of the digital healthcare gold rush,
though it is not unconnected with it.
She is only 30, but she has been nursing this company all through her 20s.
Only now is it breaking cover and making itself known.
Elizabeth Holmes has that unshakeable surety of purpose that is one of the
hallmarks of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
She dresses in black like the late Steve Jobs of Apple. Like him, too, she
generates a kind of force field of attention and self-confidence.
Unlike some rivals, Theranos' technology only requires a drop of blood and she seems to have had it since at least the age of 19, when she
dropped out of her engineering studies at Stanford University to found her
corporation.
Theranos is as yet little known, but private investors have taken stakes
that value it at an extraordinary $9bn (£5.4bn).
Ms Holmes still owns half the business, making her on paper (according
to the magazine Forbes) the youngest woman ever to become a self-made
billionaire.
And Theranos has attracted some striking believers. On one of the most
star-studded boards of directors in the USA sit two former secretaries of
state - Henry Kissinger and George Shultz - and a former defence
secretary.
Theranos has what is on the face of it a straightforward purpose - to make
blood tests simple, timely, unalarming, and cheap.
Elizabeth Holmes is convinced that she is on a big mission: "The
beginning was what I could do to make a change in the world.
"To affect people's lives in a meaningful way."
A huge number of medical diagnoses are based on blood tests - billions of
tests a year in the US alone, costing tens of billions of dollars. Yet for
many people they are unaffordable and invasive. There's a widespread fear
of needles and testing.
As a result, Ms Holmes says that in the US, nearly half the people do not
get the tests that their doctors order for them.
Theranos has a upfront price list for more than 200 specified blood tests,
seemingly far cheaper than established test companies, where the bill
comes in after the tests.
Much smaller blood samples are used to do tests - little more than a drop.
And then the blood is analysed fast in company facilities - automated labs
shrouded in proprietary secrecy.
"We are handling such small amounts of blood that we needed to
redevelop the chemistries and the analytical systems on which to run
them," she says.
Interesting yes, but is affordable blood testing really a revolution in
healthcare?
Elizabeth Holmes says it's about access to information:
"We believe that
when someone you love gets really, really sick, by the time you find out
about it is usually too late to do something about it... a very painful
experience."
A growing number of us use mobile phone apps to monitor different
aspects of our health
"If we could build a system that would help to change that, then we would
make a difference in the world."
To that end, Theranos has recently launched an alliance with the largest
drugstore chain in the USA.
Walgreen's has more than 8,500 stores all over the country, within five
miles of a huge swathe of the US population. The stores have just started
installing what are called Theranos Wellness Centers.
I dropped in on one a mile or so from the company's HQ in University
Avenue, Palo Alto.
The experience was certainly straightforward - a welcoming staffer put a
soothing warm wrapper on my finger, a pin prick which I hardly felt, and
then a small phial of blood filled in a second.
The results were emailed back in 24 hours.
To change the trajectory of early detection of illnesses, says Elizabeth
Holmes, it is very important to be close to where people live.
For some years before this retail drug store rollout, Theranos has been
making money by selling its services to big pharmaceutical companies.
For them, large-scale testing of drugs in development is an expensive,
time-consuming and cumbersome process. It's the stage where costs soar
in the development of a new drug.
Speeding up tests gets more information about the efficacy of a new drug
back to base faster. Easy, frequent blood testing may enable drug
companies to see the impact of adjusted drug dosage on their trial patients
much faster.
Theranos has Europe in its sights too. The cost to patients of blood testing
may be a hidden issue when a health service pays, but there is - says
Elizabeth Holmes - the chance to save "an incredible amount of money".
And when people start taking a much closer interest in their health by
having blood tests more frequently, then illnesses will be spotted earlier,
she thinks.
Blood testing is a market worth billions in the US alone, dominated by big
corporations such as Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp. The established
companies are unlikely to let a newcomer such as Theranos gain market
share by waiting to be undercut, if it can roll out its services as it intends.
Theranos is a highly ambitious company with a strikingly ambitious
founder and a lot still to prove.
But healthcare is only just beginning to wake up to the implications of
personalised medicine. And diagnosis - including blood tests - will be at
the heart of some great big changes in the way we think about our health.
