Fingerprick Fraud

Much like the rest of the world, pathologists have been watching with fascination as the story of direct-to-consumer testing company Theranos unfolds. From the debut of its revolutionary “Edison machine” technology – purportedly providing instant diagnoses from a single drop of blood – to the discovery that not all was as it seemed, Theranos has been making headlines ever since it first caught the public’s eye in 2013, a decade after its launch. But all that glitters is not diagnostic gold, and in 2015, the Wall Street Journal broke a story announcing that the company’s flagship technology wasn’t being used for most of its tests – and that when it was used, the results might be inaccurate (1).