Leaders from Veracyte,Inc, Visby Medical, Karius and Genalyte discuss. 


How the Theranos downfall changed the diagnostics landscape for all

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How Theranos downfall changed the diagnostics landscape

How the Theranos downfall changed the diagnostics landscape for all


So let me ask the four of you. I mean, how has this? It's been such a big story. How has it affected your business and what are the lessons that your business needs to learn from it Bonnie. I'll let you go first. Well, I mean, it had an impact early on with investor sentiment of course to see a company make that kind of a claim and and have it fall apart. Um, but I think for us internally, it just re emphasized what we always do. And that is that evidence matters that every patient on the other side of a test result could be you and the integrity of highly accurate results just couldn't be overstated. Which makes it different from, which makes bioscience different from facebook. Yeah. And I think one of the interesting thing about the turn of stories that it was actually to be quite frank was damaging under way up and it was damaging on her way down. We were actually just doing our Sirius B at the time as a startup company on the way up, A lot of investors just ask us, but why does the world need another diagnostic company after all, from one drop of blood. You can do everything on the way down. A lot of people say, oh boy, we really can't quite figure out what's right and what's wrong, what's what's real, what's not real. Maybe we should stay away from that. So it was actually really quite bad on both directions. You think it's held held diagnostics back over the last. Absolutely, that's right. I mean, look, diagnostics is hard enough, right? And like what I was saying, you can't be the trial, something, you can't just say, I'm going to figure this out from customer feedback. You can't you have to first get the science right the right way submitted to the FDA or whatever regulatory channels are needed and then you only lunch to patients once you know, the things actually work. So minimum viable product. Not no, absolutely iterations. We'll just get it out there and takes it Alex Allen. You know, I do think it has created more questions than you would normally get around the diagnostic industry. Um But I think Bonnie and Adam both said it well, you know this industry whether you're a doctor ordering a test for your hospital, deciding which test you use, whether you're an insurance company making decisions about which tests. You'll pay for theirs all standards of evidence within that framework and within that paradigm and things are regulated. So, I think as a diagnostic industry, we have to continue to talk to folks about what we do and how we help in terms of providing patients like Bonnie spoke of critical answers that they need. And, you know, as an example, 70% of medical decision making is driven by a diagnostic test results, but relative to therapeutics and relative to other categories of health care, it just doesn't get the kind of attention that it does. So you have to be ready for questions and make sure people understand how you're trying to help patients. But you know what we'll go ahead and then I'll say we had particularly close questions about it since we we promised to get your results with a small quantity of blood and in less than a few minutes um I've seen two things. One is people are much more dubious of your data. So for us we've actually resorted to shipping the machine out to third parties like the mayo clinic or scripts and let them run it themselves and publish the results. You have to be more trans. We have to be more transparent. We have to have someone else do the do the testing as opposed to our own scientists. But there is that and I mentioned that there's a there's a bright side. I say one thing they got right with evaluation That if you can, if you can show that you can do your test results in a few minutes while the patient's still there. That has a tremendous as a lot of value. And that's that's a $9 billion dollars premarket just for universal. One of the things that's clear from listening to all four of you. I mean a lot of people look at the Elizabeth Holmes story as an allegory about Silicon Valley and the sort of fake it till you make it mentality. What I'm hearing from the four of you is that mentality has never been a part of the life sciences. You can't do it. That you just can't because people's lives are at stake. Not to mention, you know, the measure what therapeutic biologic or any other part of the health care system and companies driving those discoveries, you need evidence. And that evidence has to be submitted to a third party. It has to be published. It's reviewed by experts in the field. Uh, I don't know that there are no scott to that kind of transparency, but there isn't anyone up here that doesn't have to produce evidence. Yeah. And have it be evaluated by a.