A beautiful blond recently graced the cover of Fortune magazine. Not your everyday “pretty face,” Ms Holmes is also very, very smart. And now she is rich.
It seems that when Ms Holmes was 19 and an undergrad at Stanford, she started a company called Theranos that is now worth more than $9 billion. Yes, $9 billion!
Founder, CEO now at age 30, Ms Holmes invented a revolutionary blood diagnostics company. Her original invention was a wearable patch, that in addition to administering a drug, would monitor variables in the patient’s blood to see if the therapy was working.
Theranos’ latest product is a diagnostic blood test that only needs a couple of drops to give tons of information. To put this development in perspective, the article says that traditional blood tests take 100 to 1,000 times more blood to get the same information.
Her company has performed as many as 70 different tests from a single tiny draw via its patented, oh-so-gentle blood draw method that feels more like a tap than a puncture. This teensy amount of blood goes into what Ms Holmes describes as a “nanotainer” about the size of an electric fuse.
The benefits of this new blood draw technology? Multifold.
It makes it easy to order and retest blood samples and the cost is about half as expensive as traditional methodology. In addition, the company posts its prices online, which according to the article author is revolutionary considering the secret world of health care pricing.
Why is this young woman so determined to change the face of the health care industry?
A letter the nine-year-old Holmes wrote to her father might suggest it’s in her blood, “Dear Daddy, What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something mankind didn’t know was possible to do.”
“New Blood” by Roger Parloff in Fortune (June 30, 2014) See fortune.com.
