Remember Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, who is now serving an 11-year-plus sentence in federal prison for fraud? It turns out that detecting dozens of different diseases with a single drop of blood is a pretty difficult trick, especially while you’re busy screwing your investors and your chief operating officer. Someone should make a miniseries about it on Hulu or something.
Plenty of legitimate companies are still pursuing what is expected to be a very lucrative blood diagnostics market. The most compelling and competitive corner of that market is focused on cancer. So-called liquid biopsies have been around for a while, using blood samples or other bodily fluids to detect everything from certain cancers to heart attacks to potential birth defects. Blood tests have also been used to monitor the effectiveness of cancer treatments or relapses. Advances in next generation sequencing (NGS) and related molecular techniques, along with the associated drop in costs as these technologies mature, are expected to eventually lead to a new era in preventive cancer screening.
Guardant Health and Multi-Cancer Early Detection
The Holy Grail is a multi-cancer early detection (MCED) test that looks for trace amounts of cancer DNA in the bloodstream. While many of today’s late-stage cancer tests use a similar approach by detecting cell-
