She's
America's youngest female billionaire - and a dropout
According
to American Clinical Laboratory Association, more than 7 billion lab tests are
performed in the U.S. annually and lab results dictate 80% of clinical
decisions. Far too often, the cost of laboratory tests and the fear of having a
needle jabbed into one's arm deters patients from getting the necessary tests.
October 16, 2014: 3:57 PM ET
NEW YORK (CNNMoney)
America's youngest
self-made female billionaire is 30 years old and a college dropout. The company
she founded has the potential to change health care for millions of Americans.
Elizabeth Holmes left
Stanford University at 19 with a plan to start her own company. For money, she
cashed out the funds her parents had saved for tuition. Now, she counts
billionaire Larry Ellison as an investor and has former secretaries of state on
her board.
"I think a lot of young people have incredible ideas and
incredible insights, but sometimes they wait before they go give their life to
something," she said. "What I did was just to start a little
earlier."
Holmes,
through her company Theranos, has taken on the $76 billion
laboratory-diagnostic industry as her target. It's an industry that was just
waiting to be disrupted, since blood testing has not changed since the modern
clinical lab emerged in the 1960s.
Her
idea: No more vials. No more tourniquets. Just a pinprick of blood gathered in
a container smaller than a dime. And up to 70 lab tests can be run on one drop
of blood in less time than traditional tests.
Holmes
thinks that ease of testing will make people more likely to go through with
blood tests and help with earlier detection of illness, something she's
passionate about. Her father, Christian Holmes IV, has spent a career working
in humanitarian assistance, including several executive positions with USAID.
"My
father worked in disaster relief and so I grew up in a house that had pictures
of all these little children in really tough parts of the world," she
said. "I was absolutely convinced that was what I was going to do. Then
when I started realizing that a company could be a vehicle for having very direct
impact over a change that you are trying to make, I started thinking about the
concept of what could I build that could impact a lot of peoples' lives?"
The solution she's built is the Theranos Wellness Center, which
has calming music, glossy magazines and offers a blood test with a relatively
painless prick. Holmes' ultimate goal is to have one center within five miles
of any American (or one mile for folks in big cities).
Theranos
teamed up with Walgreens pharmacies to help make that happen, and the centers
are built within existing Walgreens stores.
There
are currently centers in California and Arizona, with plans for a gradual
rollout into 8,200 neighborhood Walgreens across the country.
"It's
bringing the testing closer to where people live and also changing the hours of
operation, so that on a weekend or late at night you can get access to these
tests. You don't have to leave work, leave your job during the day,"
Holmes said.
Holmes
is also a proponent of transparency in health care, so Theranos lists the price
of all of its nearly 1,000 tests on its website. Often the costs are a fraction
of what they would be through standard reimbursement rates.
"Forty
to sixty percent of Americans today are not compliant with even the basic tests
that their physicians give them when they do see them, because often they can't
afford it, or they are scared of needles," Holmes said.
She
feels the same way about needles.
"I
really believe that if we were from another planet and we sat down to put our
heads together on torture experiments, the concept of sticking a needle into
someone and sucking their blood out would probably qualify as a pretty good
one," she said.
