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Theranos avoids bankruptcy thanks to a last-minute loan
Theranos has come a long way from the days when it was a darling in the biotech industry. The Wall Street Journal's sources have claimed that the blood-testing firm has avoided bankruptcy by securing a $100 million loan from Fortress Investment Group. The move should keep Theranos afloat "through 2018," founder Elizabeth Holmes reportedly said in an email. Naturally, though, there are strings attached -- Fortress wants to see a return on its investment.
Theranos settlement means it could have a lab again in 2019
Theranos has been headed toward disaster for a while through its questonable blood testing methods, but it might have just avoided the worst possible outcome. The biotech outfit has reached a settlement with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that should end the legal and regulatory fights between the two. In return for Theranos dropping appeals of both its 2-year lab ban and sanctions on its Newark lab, CMS has decided against revoking Theranos' Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) certificates and reducing the civil financial penalty to $30,000. Theranos is voluntarily giving up the certificates, as it's not running labs that would need them.
Theranos CEO faces ban from operating a blood-testing lab
As more details surface about blood-testing startup Theranos, federal regulators are looking to ban the company's founder. The Wall Street Journal reports the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is looking to not only revoke Theranos' federal license, but it also wants to keep its founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes and president Sunny Balwani from owning or running another lab for a minimum of two years. Theranos currently has testing facilities in California and Arizona, so the ban would impact both locations.
Walgreens starts breaking up with Theranos
The Financial Times is reporting that Walgreens is now actively looking to dump troubled blood testing startup Theranos. Sources claim that the pharmacy chain has instructed its lawyers to look at the partnership contract in the hope of finding an easy way out. The paper also says that Theranos is confident that the agreement is watertight and will force Walgreens to stand by it while it fixes its (numerous) problems. It's believed that Walgreens is annoyed at the wealth of negative publicity Theranos has generated and is worried about being tainted by association.
Lab-on-a-chip aims to take suspense out of blood work
If your doctor's ever uttered the words, "I'd like to run more tests," you know the wait for results can be torturous. Engineers and students at the University of Rhode Island (URI) are hoping to stop the torture with a new lab-on-a-chip technology that cuts way back on the wait for important lab results. The system provides results in 30 minutes, using a portable device and just a drop of blood. The blood is placed on a small plastic polymer cartridge, smaller than a credit card, and inserted into a shoebox-sized biosensor. It then travels across the cartridge to a detection site where reagents enable the sensor to detect biomarkers of disease. Basically, your doctor pops a bloody piece of plastic into a box, and out come your results. The first cartridges were developed to assess the risk of heart disease, but researches suggest they could be designed to detect everything from HIV to Alzheimer's. The URI team estimates costs at $3200 for the sensor and $1.50 for the test. No official word on a release date, but we hope they won't make us wait too long -- we can't stand the suspense.
