Diagnostics

Theranos cuts 41% of workforce as it concentrates on miniLab (updated)

This could indicate that the former unicorn is abandoning its once-highly touted blood testing technology and going all in with its new miniLab lab-in-a-box concept.

Unemployment image from Flickr user MjaMes1408

Theranos is retrenching once again, announcing Friday that it is cutting approximately 41 percent of its remaining workforce. This could indicate that the former unicorn is abandoning its once-highly touted blood testing technology and going all in with its new miniLab lab-in-a-box concept.

Palo Alto, California-based Theranos said it was letting 155 of its 375 employees go. This follows the elimination of 340 jobs in October, when the company decided to close its clinical laboratories and end direct-to-consumer blood testing services.

Theranos said it will be left with a “core team” of 220 employees. That is a little more than quarter of the workforce of 790 the company had as of Aug. 1.

“In the streamlined organization, teams have been aligned to meet product development, regulatory and commercial milestones,” the company said in a statement posted on its website. The remaining employees would be working “towards commercialization of the miniLab testing platform and its related technologies.”

A Theranos spokesman indicated that there would be no further comment.

CEO Elizabeth Holmes previewed miniLab in August at a much-panned appearance at the American Association for Clinical Chemistry Annual Scientific Meeting in Philadelphia.

Holmes had been expected to provide peer-reviewed data on the technology she had been working on since dropping out of Stanford University in 2003, a system called Edison that was supposed to replace traditional blood draws with a simple finger stick.

Theranos has never publicly said that Edison was a failure, but the company last year lost its CLIA certificate from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Holmes was banned from running a clinical lab for two years. Investors, consumers and former partner Walgreens have all sued the company for fraud.

On Jan. 1, Theranos officially did away with its vanity Board of Counselors. That board included the likes of former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, ex-Defense Secretary William Perry, retired Marine Corps Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis, retired Navy Adm. Gary Roughead and ex-U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn.

For more on the history of Theranos, see our extensive timeline of the company’s rise and fall.

Photo:Flickr user MjaMes1408

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