This CEO's out for blood[Author’s note: On December 1. I published a protracted correction to this article here.] In the fall of 2. Elizabeth Holmes, a 1.

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Stanford, plopped herself down in the office of her chemical engineering professor, Channing Robertson, and said, “Let’s start a company.”Robertson, who had seen thousands of undergraduates over his 3. Holmes just more than a year.

I knew she was different,” Robertson told me in an interview. The novelty of how she would view a complex technical problem–it was unique in my experience.”Holmes had then just spent the summer working in a lab at the Genome Institute in Singapore, a post she had been able to fill thanks to having learned Mandarin in her spare hours as a Houston teenager.

© AOL Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Terms of Use Preferences Contact Us. History. The original product was made at the Casa de Fritos (now Rancho Del Zocalo) at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, during the early 1960s. Elizabeth Holmes founded her revolutionary blood diagnostics company, Theranos, when she was 19. It’s now worth more than $9 billion, and poised to change health care. E! Entertainment Television, LLC. A Division of NBCUniversal with news, shows, photos, and videos. E! Online - Your source for entertainment news, celebrities, celeb news, and celebrity gossip. Check out the hottest fashion, photos, movies and TV shows! Mediagazer presents the day's must-read media news on a single page.

Upon returning to Palo Alto, she showed Robertson a patent application she had just written. As a freshman, Holmes had taken Robertson’s seminar on advanced drug- delivery devices–things like patches, pills, and even a contact- lens- like film that secreted glaucoma medication–but now she had invented one the likes of which Robertson had never conceived. It 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 having the desired effect, and adjust the dosage accordingly.“I remember her saying, ‘And we could put a cellphone chip on it, and it could telemeter out to the doctor or the patient what was going on,’ ” Robertson recounts. And I kind of kicked myself.

I’d consulted in this area for 3. I’d never said, here we make all these gizmos that measure, and all these systems that deliver, but I never brought the two together.”Still, he balked at seeing her start a company before finishing her degree. I said, ‘Why do you want to do this?’ And she said, ‘Because systems like this could completely revolutionize how effective health care is delivered. And this is what I want to do.

I don’t want to make an incremental change in some technology in my life. I want to create a whole new technology, and one that is aimed at helping humanity at all levels regardless of geography or ethnicity or age or gender.’ ”That clinched it for him. When I finally connected with what Elizabeth fundamentally is,” he says, “I realized that I could have just as well been looking into the eyes of a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates.” Theranos can run as many as 7. Photograph by Drew Kelly for Fortune. With Robertson’s blessing, Holmes started her company and, a semester later, dropped out to pursue it full- time.

Now she’s 3. 0, and her private, Palo Alto- based corporation, called Theranos–the name is an amalgam of the words “therapy” and “diagnosis”–has 5. All these numbers, confirmed to me by an outside director, are being published here for the first time. Though Theranos is largely unknown even in Silicon Valley, that is about to change.“This is about being able to do good,” Holmes says to me about her company. And it’s about being able to change the health care system through what we believe this country does so well, which is innovation and creativity and the ability to conceive of technology that can help solve policy challenges.”At first glance it’s hard to see the connection between the patch that wowed Robertson and what Theranos does now. But as we will see, to Holmes they are simply different “embodiments” of the same core insights.

Theranos today is a potentially highly disruptive upstart in America’s $7. Medicare and Medicaid each pay roughly $1. Theranos runs what’s called a high- complexity laboratory, certified by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and it is licensed to operate in nearly every state. It currently offers more than 2. Theranos’s tests can be performed on just a few drops of blood, or about 1/1.

Theranos phlebotomists–technicians licensed to take blood–draw it with a finger stick using a patented method that minimizes even the minor discomfort involved with that procedure. To me, it felt more like a tap than a puncture.) The Theranos “wellness center” at the Walgreen’s drugstore in down­town Palo Alto. Theranos’s prices for tests are often a half to a quarter of independent lab prices and a quarter to a tenth of hospital lab prices. Photograph by Drew Kelly for Fortune. The company has performed as many as 7. Holmes has dubbed a “nanotainer.” Such a volley of tests with conventional techniques would require numerous tubes of blood, each containing 3,0. The fact that Theranos’s technology uses such microscopic amounts of blood should eventually allow physicians far greater latitude when ordering so- called reflex tests than they have previously enjoyed.

With reflex testing, the physician specifies that if a certain test comes up abnormal, the lab should immediately perform follow- up tests on the same sample to pinpoint the cause of the abnormality. Max Payne Full Movie In English. Reflex testing saves patients the time, inconvenience, cost, and pain of return doctor visits and additional blood draws. The results of Theranos’s tests are available within hours–often matching the speed of emergency “stat” labs today, though stat labs, which are highly inefficient, can usually perform only a limited menu of maybe 4.

Most important, Theranos tests cost less. Its prices are often a half to a quarter of what independent labs charge, and a quarter to a 1. Such pricing represents a potential godsend for the uninsured, the insured with high deductibles, insurers, and taxpayers. Watch Scream 2 4Shared. The company’s prices are set to never exceed half the Medicare reimbursement rate for each procedure, a fact that, with widespread adoption, could save the nation billions. The company also posts its prices online, a seemingly obvious service to consumers, but one that is revolutionary in the notoriously opaque, arbitrary, and disingenuous world of contemporary health care pricing.

Precisely how Theranos accomplishes all these amazing feats is a trade secret. Holmes will only say–and this is more than she has ever said before–that her company uses “the same fundamental chemical methods” as existing labs do. Its advances relate to “optimizing the chemistry” and “leveraging software” to permit those conventional methods to work with tiny sample volumes.

Laboratory scientists perform biochemical experiments in a Theranos R& D lab in Palo Alto. Photograph by Drew Kelly for Fortune.

The scale of Theranos’s operations at the moment is modest. Its phlebotomists currently take physician- ordered blood draws (and saliva, urine, feces, and other samples) at collection centers the company operates at its headquarters in Palo Alto and at 2. Walgreens–one in Palo Alto and the rest in Phoenix. But these are only the advance guard in a gradual national rollout that Walgreens committed to last September; it plans to establish Theranos outposts in a substantial percentage of its 8,2.

It is the first step in Holmes’s audacious plan to place a Theranos center within five miles of almost every American and within one mile of every city dweller. Watch Monster High: Why Do Ghouls Fall In Love? 4Shared there. Walgreens CEO Greg Wasson told me in an interview that he hopes to eventually put them in the pharmacies of the company’s European partner chain, Alliance Boots, as well. At least as significant, three hospital groups are now working closely with Theranos with the aim of deploying its lab services–UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco, Dignity Health’s 2. Intermountain Healthcare’s 2. Utah and Idaho.“I just think this is so exciting,” says Mark Laret, the CEO of UCSF Medical Center, about what he’s seen so far.