Other Blood Companies Are Still Pissed About Theranos

What is was like competing with -- and dealing with the wreckage of -- the most infamous startup in the world. From a report: Theranos' collapse was as public as it gets for a Silicon Valley unicorn, beginning in 2015 with a widely read series of articles by former Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou, who revealed that Theranos' technology was far less effective than advertised. The debacle went on to inspire the bestselling book Bad Blood by Carreyrou, an HBO documentary, and a forthcoming Hulu series starring Amanda Seyfried. This week, Holmes' highly anticipated trial begins in earnest. Jurors were sworn in last Thursday, and opening statements will begin on Wednesday. Prosecutors have charged Holmes with multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy related to the ascent and operations of Theranos, though she maintains her innocence. Once famous for a supposedly innovative approach to blood testing, now infamous for allegedly faking it, the names Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes aren't fading away anytime soon.

All of this has had a ripple effect for other companies that, like Theranos, were trying to make blood drawing and diagnostics easier for consumers. I spoke to five such companies recently about how they have dealt with unwelcome comparisons to Theranos, which has bedeviled the sector ever since Carreyrou's first piece on the subject. One company I reached out to expressed that it was hesitant to even appear in an article about Theranos. Even before Theranos imploded, its outsize presence was felt by other companies in the blood testing industry, for better and worse. 'In the beginning, when Theranos was on its up slope, people were asking how we were ever going to compete with a company like Theranos when they've raised a billion dollars,' said Daniel Levner, co-founder of Sight Diagnostics, a biotech company that sells a device that can conduct a blood count analysis from a finger prick.

Yet when Carreyrou's pieces began appearing in the Journal, comparisons to Theranos became a curse for its peers. 'In pretty much every conversation we had for a year, Theranos would come up,' said John Lewis, founder and CEO of Nanostics, a biotech company that sells a device that can use a very small amount of blood to diagnose and predict diseases. 'Most people recognized that Theranos was mostly just bad founders, but it certainly was on everybody's mind.' Lewis recounts that his company, which had only existed for a year and a half at the time, was in a pitch competition right as the Theranos scandal was coming to light. The very first question they got at the event was how the Nanostics product compared to Theranos'. From there, Nanostics took pains to distinguish itself from Theranos, down to the smallest details. For instance, the company in its promotional materials tried to stay away from Theranos' famous selling point of diagnosing diseases from a single drop of blood. 'Our initial plan was to go out saying that we can detect disease signatures with a single drop of blood, but that was literally just when Theranos was going down for stating that they could do that when they couldn't,' Lewis recalled. 'So in our texts we said, 'two drops of blood.''

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