Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2014. Its figures and claims are from then: the 9-billion-dollar valuation, ‘youngest woman billionaire in the US’, the Walgreens partnership (ended in 2016), more than 70 tests from a finger-prick sample, and prices 50-90% below other US services. Theranos’s blood-testing claims later proved false. The company was dissolved in 2018, and in 2022 Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors and sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.
These days, Elizabeth Holmes needs no introduction. She is the founder and CEO of Theranos, a company currently valued at 9 billion dollars that is transforming medicine and promises to save millions of lives around the world. That valuation has made her the youngest woman billionaire in the United States.
In a TEDMED talk, Elizabeth explained how she came up with this business idea and what drove her to make it happen. And the story is genuinely moving.
When she was a child, she spent a lot of time with her uncle, someone who was very important to her.
“I remember his love of crossword puzzles and how he tried to teach us to play soccer,” Elizabeth says in her talk. She spent summers and holidays with him. But one day he was diagnosed with skin cancer, and when he went to the doctor, he was told it had already spread to other parts of his body.
Suddenly the cancer reached his brain and his bones. He never got to see his son grow up, and he never got to say goodbye to his niece.
The problem behind her uncle’s death is that doctors only diagnose illnesses once a person starts showing symptoms, because most people only go to the doctor when they have symptoms, and the visit often comes too late.
If her uncle had had the right tests in time, he would probably still be alive today, so Elizabeth Holmes’s motivation is to stop other people from dying a preventable death.
With Theranos, the company she founded, she offers people a much faster, easier and cheaper way to access their own health information, giving them the chance to get early treatment, even before symptoms appear.
(Read: These are the 10 richest women in tech)
Holmes has described access to health information as a basic human right. Remember that in countries like the United States, if you don’t have health insurance, you have to pay a lot of money for a medical check-up or even a simple blood test.
The lab tests Theranos provides would give people the same information that is used in 60–80% of clinical decisions, at least in theory. With just a small blood sample collected in a “nanotainer”, Theranos can run more than 70 medical tests.
Holmes’s company has partnered with Walgreens, so anyone who needs or wants to can go to the participating locations at any time of day (not just during working hours). After a painless finger-prick, Theranos runs those 70-plus tests and can check anything from blood sugar abnormalities to sexually transmitted infections, at a price 50 to 90 percent lower than any other service on offer in the United States.
Investors, of course, are delighted with the idea behind the company: not only does it have a solid and profitable business model, it has a great future ahead of it, and it really can make the world better and save lives.
To get an idea of what this woman is offering individuals… let’s say she lets you keep complete track of your health, including warning you about serious diseases before they fully develop. And you can do all of this as easily as someone who uses bathroom scales to keep an eye on their weight.
Further reading
- 9 technologies that could change the world
- She believed so firmly in her business idea that she risked her whole family’s assets
Featured image: Kevin Krejci from Near the Pacific Ocean, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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