Disgraced Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes to Serve 11 Years, Three Months in Prison, Ending the Latest Chapter in the Story of the Failed Clinical Laboratory Company

Judge will decide the restitution Holmes must pay to defrauded Theranos investors at future court date; Ex-COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani to be sentenced next month Clinical laboratory leaders and anatomic pathologists who closely followed the fraud trial of Elizabeth Holmes may have wondered how the Theranos founder and ex-CEO would be punished for her crimes. Now we know. On Friday, a federal court judge sentenced Holmes to 135 months—11.25 years—in prison in the culmination of her conviction on...

Attention Pathologists! New Prostate Cancer Test Has CPT Code, NCCN Guideline Recommendation, and Potential Market of One Million Prostate Biopsies Annually

OPKO Health’s 4Kscore test predicts the rate of high-risk prostate cancer and may become a useful business case study for other labs developing proprietary diagnostic tests Clinical laboratories and biotech companies with new medical laboratory tests are struggling to win coverage by Medicare and private payers. How big is this problem? There are currently tens of thousands of molecular diagnostic assays and genetic tests offered for clinical use. Any lab company seeking to obtain an...

Sound Wave Acoustic Tweezers Locate and Isolate Circulating Tumor Cells in Liquid Biopsies; Could Lead to Less Invasive Cancer Diagnostics and Treatments

Pathologists will be interested to learn that this latest version of the acoustic tweezer device requires about five hours to identify the CTCs in a sample of blood Medical laboratory leaders and pathologists are well aware that circulating tumor cells (CTCs) released by primary tumors into the bloodstream are fragile and easily damaged. Many studies have sought to find ways to separate CTCs from surrounding cells. Such a process could then be used as an early-detection biomarker to detect...

Researchers at Howard Hughes Medical Institute Develop Blood Test That Reveals a Patient’s Viral History; Could Reduce Unnecessary Clinical Laboratory Testing

The VirScan test gives doctors insight into a patient’s lifetime exposure to viruses and thus may be developed into a useful medical laboratory test Scientists and pathologists are learning that blood is like a time capsule, holding precious information about exposure to viruses over the years—chickenpox at five, mononucleosis at 18, flu at 40. You get the idea. Now, researchers at Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)  have found a way to tap that entire data stream, so to speak. An...

Smartphone “Dongle” Achieves Capabilities of Big Clinical Laboratory Analyzers: Diagnoses Three Diseases at Once from Single Drop of Blood

This breakthrough in technology miniaturization holds great promise for improving public health, but portends a disruptive future ahead for the medical labs  Is the medical laboratory industry ready for a handheld device that can do immunoassay testing without requiring any stored energy? The secret of this device, already undergoing field trials in Rwanda, is that it uses a smartphone accessory, or “dongle,” to capture and transmit the results of the lab tests. This innovative smartphone...
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