Theranos’ CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes is continuing to make her presence known, despite backlash against the approval of the company’s blood testing technology.
She took the stage on Monday at the Fortune Global Forum and continued to defend her company.
Fortune Editor Alan Murray reportedly encouraged Holmes to discuss the obvious elephant in the room, and she only said that Theranos needs to “do a better job of communicating” the science and the data behind its offerings. “We haven’t put into the public domain much of our work,” she said. “We haven’t talked about our devices.”
Holmes did mention that the company is only using one finger prick blood test commercially right now – as of a few weeks ago. She stated that they are only doing the one at the moment because of the FDA transition. “We are only doing one, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have the technology to do them,” she said, as Fortune reported.” “There’s no reason we can’t do peer review and publish other statistics.”
As far as approval is concerned, yes or no, Holmes replied to the question with, “Absolutely.”
According to Business Insider, Holmes also stated that the company is not currently planning or needing to raise more capital. As Walgreens is concerned with Theranos wellness centers in Arizona, there hasn’t been pullback, according to Holmes.
“They haven’t said it to us. We’re talking with them and we were at point where we had completed our rollout in Phoenix,” Holmes said.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
In regards to media coverage as of late, she stated:
“What we’ve seen in this is that we’ve never talked about the technology and operations on the back end because we were so focused on our intellectual property. What we want to do now is introduce that to the world so people can see what we built.”
