"Steve Jobs in a Skirt": Elizabeth Holmes and her breakthrough in medicine

Elizabeth Holmes is a tall blonde with a sloppy hairdo. She is 31 years old and the youngest billionaire woman in the world. Holmes is often compared to Steve Jobs. Both spent a lot of time alone as children. They both dropped out because they believed there were things more important. Like Jobs, Holmes believed from the beginning that her company would change the world. Jobs became a billionaire by the age of 40, and Holmes - much earlier. Last year, her Theranos project was valued at $ 9 billion, and she owns more than half of the shares.

Holmes wears black turtlenecks, drinks celery with cucumber, does not eat meat, because it makes the body less willing to sleep. Jobs’ biography hangs on her wall, although turtlenecks are imitations of Sharon Stone as an elite prostitute in Martin Scorsese’s "Casino." Holmes has more than a hundred black turtlenecks, and in the mornings she doesn’t waste time thinking about what to wear. Forbes and Fortune have enthusiastically written about Holmes, she is on most of the lists of the most influential people on the planet and in the rankings of billionaires. This young woman does not hide how she achieved this.

Childhood and Stanford

"What I really want is to discover something new, something that humanity never knew existed," Holmes wrote to her father when she was nine. She admits that she was a strange child: "I read a ton of books, read" Moby Dick ". I still have a time machine design in my notebook that I drew at seven. ” As a child, Holmes read a biography of her great-grandfather, Christian Holmes, a surgeon, engineer and inventor. He was born in Denmark in 1857, was the dean of the Cincinnati Medical College in the United States, and the hospital in that city is named after him. The ancestor inspired Holmes to connect life with medicine, but it was not possible to become a doctor - at some point the girl realized that she was afraid when she saw the needle. She later said that this was the main reason for the launch of Theranos, a company that allows blood tests to be taken from a finger instead of a vein.
When Holmes moved to Palo Alto to study at Stanford, her parents sent her a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Reflections, stating that "life must have a purpose." She entered the Faculty of Chemical Engineering.
In her first year of study, Holmes asked Dean Channing Robertson to allow her to enter the lab, which was attended mainly by PhD students. The head of the faculty objected at first, but the student was persistent - every day she waited for him at the door of the laboratory and asked when he would let her inside. Robertson surrendered.
In the summer, Holmes agreed with the Stanford administration that he would be able to attend a Chinese language class. She then applied for an internship at the Genome Institute in Singapore, where she studied atypical pneumonia, which was common in Asia at the time. She watched the blood tests, and thought it could be done differently, in more modern ways.
Returning to the United States, Holmes began work. "Elizabeth hardly got up from her desk for five or six days," recalls her mother, Noel Holmes. The result of the work was a patent application - a patch that releases a medical substance and monitors changes in the blood. You can attach a chip from a mobile phone to it and transfer the data to the doctor. She showed it to Professor Robertson.
At age 19, Holmes dropped out of university, invested the money the family had set aside for her studies in her own company, and began looking for investors. “I knew I had to talk to at least two hundred people to interest at least one of them. That’s why I didn’t worry about the failures, "Holmes recalls.

Money

First of all, she invited Robertson to be her advisor. He has already helped several startups in the field of biotechnology, but their founders were much older than the young Holmes - then she was barely 21 years old. "There are one or two like her in each generation," the professor explained. By 2005, Holmes had raised about $ 6 million, which was not enough. She understood that in order to make a breakthrough, you need to forget about money, the thought of "how to pay the salary next month" should not interfere with work.
Clinical trials required tests, and Holmes signed contracts with pharmaceutical corporations, including Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, and began operating as a division. The cooperation added Holmes status, and more serious investors became interested in her project. By the end of 2010, it had raised $ 92 million. Calm work began on the tests.
In parallel, the board of directors of Theranos included former military and officials: former head of the State Department Henry Kissinger, former defense ministers and generals. The company’s closeness to the US military-industrial complex has been discussed, and Holmes herself explains her choice by the professionalism of these people, although she admits that she uses technology outside of civilian medicine. She considers the military area "an important area in terms of potential for saving lives." She is offended to hear that board members are lobbying.

Holmes’s strategy is on company all the time: he rarely has fun, has little to do with other than his younger brother, who also works at Theranos

. She has not been on a date or vacation for the last ten years.
The company’s know-how allows for just one drop of blood from a finger to perform 30 tests using microfluids and a new technology that Holmes keeps secret. It is faster and cheaper than in conventional laboratories. "For a long time, I couldn’t even tell my wife what I was doing," says Robertson. Holmes first spoke about her project ten years later. Now the American market is divided between two giants Quest Diagnostics and Laboratory Corporation of America. But their tests are more expensive than Theranos’ tests. For example, cholesterol results in a regular lab will cost $ 17, and Theranos will cost $ 2.99.
According to Holmes, 40% of people do not take a doctor’s blood test because they are afraid of needles or cannot pay the high price. Its goal is to make Theranos centers 5 km from every home in the United States, and then start a global expansion.
Good luck - Holmes managed to attract 50-year-old programmer Sunny Balvani to the company. He worked at Lotus and Microsoft, graduated from Stanford and received an MBA from Berkeley. Holmes understood that serious blood software would be needed to create a blood test. In 2009, Balvani became president of the company. "We’ve automated the process from start to finish," he says.
The company now offers more than 200 tests licensed by the Federal Commission. Theranos has entered into an agreement with Walgreens, the largest pharmacy chain, to build thousands of centers, starting in California and Arizona, offering to pass the analysis on site. The result can be seen in the application on the same or the next day. Holmes knows that blood can tell a variety of disorders, from high cholesterol to cancer, and the screening process should be as painless as buying medicine at a drugstore near your home.
It creates a platform for the development of preventive medicine. Today, people have a habit of delaying a visit to the doctor and often seek help when the disease is already too far away and cannot be cured.

Prospects

Holmes has dedicated a third of his life to the company, but the project is still at an early stage of development. The next 20 years will be enough for her to make the service accessible and widespread. Holmes believes that there should be one main goal in life, so she is not going to do anything else. Today, she holds 18 patents in the United States and 66 outside the country. Theranos has almost 1,000 employees and the company is constantly expanding.
Holmes is often criticized. They say that a blood test does not always indicate a disease, it is impossible to diagnose and prescribe treatment based on these data alone. Holmes is not embarrassed - she continues to move forward. The company works with the Carlos Slim Foundation’s network of medical centers in Mexico City, which uses Theranos to diagnose diabetes and other treatable diseases in the early articles.
In addition, on October 16, The Wall Street Journal published an investigation alleging that Elizabeth Holmes deceived customers and the professional community and did not actually use her designs to obtain analysis.

Cover photo : Theranos
Sources : New Yorker , CBS News , Forbes

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