Not a week goes by and it seems like we hear more bad news about Silicon Valley’s darling turned cautionary tale Theranos. The latest bit is a whopping 155 layoffs at the company today.
The one drop blood test company once worth $9 billion took a quite the tumble from grace after an intense series of investigations from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Several Wall Street Journal articles also began to raise questions about the accuracy of the startup’s technology and CMS declared the company was putting patients in “immediate danger.”
Then mid-last year founder Elizabeth Holmes was banned from operating in her own labs.
To save the company Theranos revealed a new type of box in August of 2016 meant to detect diseases like Zika out in the field, pending FDA approval. But the tabletop “miniLab” also met with scrutiny within the medical industry.
Now it seems things have gone from worse to barely breathing. The layoffs announced today cut into 41 percent of Theranos’ workforce and follows a 340 person cut in October of last year.
Theranos calls these layoffs a “re-engineering,” leaving a mere 220 employees to carry on with the miniLab development.
“The restructuring follows a period of significant change at the company that has included the building out of its executive team with substantial additional regulatory, compliance and operational expertise,” Theranos said.
