March 7, 2023
PALO ALTO — Step outside the quiet Stanford Medicine building where geneticist and prominent big data expert Mike Snyder has spent years poring over tiny samples of blood, and you can just see the outline of 1701 Page Mill Road, one of the original offices of Theranos.
It’s impossible not to notice similarities between Snyder’s mission and the vision proffered by Elizabeth Holmes, the Stanford dropout convicted of defrauding investors backing the blood testing company Theranos. Both aimed to give people deeper insights into their own health so they could seek preventive care faster. But while Holmes sought to build a small, printer-sized instrument that could analyze a single drop of blood, Snyder and his team are patenting a process of collecting and testing “micro samples,” which are then shipped to a lab and analyzed using standard methods. He and colleagues have launched two companies that plan to license that microsampling process as they raise venture capital to commercialize the tests, which they’re already preparing to sell to consumers.
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