Why Silicon Valley Keeps Getting Biotechnology Wrong

Two years after the $9 billion start-up “unicorn” Theranos crumbled, Silicon Valley still appears to be struggling to learn its lesson when it comes to health and medical start-ups. Improbable-sounding companies continue to turn up with tens of millions of dollars in funding, no published research to back them up, and nothing but criticism from scientists. Last week, BuzzFeed News examined a new set of start-ups promising to detect cancer early via a simple blood test — Freenome, Grail, and Guardant — and found them on paths dangerously similar to the one Theranos was on just a few years ago. A year ago, Freenome promised to publish about its product in a scientific journal “very soon” to Fast Company, and still hasn’t. Cancer researchers told BuzzFeed very plainly that such a simple test would be miraculous but seemed improbably advanced beyond our current technology, which was also the case with Theranos’s miniature blood tests — and Freenome made its lofty promises only months after Theranos started to fall apart. Like a Kickstarter project well over its anticipated delivery date...