By Devin Coldewey, Sarah Buhr (@sarahbuhr), Contributor
Theranos is closing its labs and wellness centers, CEO Elizabeth Holmes announced today in a post on the company blog. And this isn’t a temporary closure: the “approximately” 340 employees running them are out of a job.
“After many months spent assessing our strengths and addressing our weaknesses, we have moved to structure our company around the model best aligned with our core values and mission,” Holmes wrote.
The company pivoted away from working on its closely held “nanotainer” technology to a “miniLab” in August. The boxy device — unveiled at the American Association for Clinical Chemistry conference — collects small samples of blood and urine and then uploads them to a centralized system for further analysis.
And it’s a far cry from what the company, once valued at $9 billion, set out to do. According to several experts whom TechCrunch spoke to at the unveiling, it might not be very innovative, either. Although Theranos didn’t want its new device referred to as a “lab on a chip,” that’s essentially what these experts said the miniLab was. And that has been done.
The new device hinges largely on FDA approval — something Holmes said she’d hoped to fast-track under the emergency use authorization (EUA) for Zika detectors. That plan didn’t go so well, however. The FDA denied Theranos approval after finding the company failed to use proper patient safety protocols.
