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, one begins to wonder if it was all fake.
Silicon Valley has a kind of blind spot when it comes to biotechnology, health-related start-ups, and other medical pursuits. The Theranos hype train was only stopped when The Wall Street Journal surfaced evidence that Theranos had misrepresented how far along it was in its research process to its investors, passing off mediocre test results as much more conclusive than they were. Venture-capital firms insist that the standard that needs to be met for investment is much higher for medical start-ups, which must prove that their technology works with data, not just a pitch. And yet somehow, when these start-ups finally surface to public consciousness, they don’t appear to pass even the most basic smell test with literally any experienced researcher in the field.
There are some confounding factors to take into account: venture capitalists invest in ambitious businesses and expect a high failure rate; health start-up failures are highly visible in part because biotechnology businesses are more unusual, and because they tend to be involved with actual life-or-death human experiences. No one really cares about another Uber-alike (just as no one really cared about Uber until it had established itself) — but almost everyone has a personal relationship with cancer, and everyone wants a solution to it as soon as possible.
But the fact that we all have bodies, and all need doctors may also be why Silicon Valley seems unable to avoid dabbling in medical technology. The intersection of future tech and health has become crowded with some of the country’s richest hobbyists. They love “biohacking” (there’s even a subscription box). They believe, almost to a man, that the singularity is a question of not if, but when. Elon Musk is very seriously investing in arming biological humans against computers; Peter Thiel takes human growth hormone, a popular practice among transhumanists, and has expressed interested in getting blood transfusions from young people as a way of reversing aging (to his credit, there is some published scientific evidence this might actually work, however fundamentally sinister it sounds). Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, and Martine Rothblatt have all sincerely expressed interests in similar pursuits. They often seem less concerned with protecting humanity than their own consciousnesses, designing brain-machine interfaces that will both preserve their own copious knowledge reserves and merge them with the larger internet, turning each tech CEO, investor, and founder into an army of IBM Watsons, but smarter.
There is a pervasive sense in Silicon Valley, bolstered by ten years of world-conquering success, that any sufficiently intelligent, sufficiently driven person can will what they want. The only thing slowing the unrelenting forward march of medical tech is funding. Solutions are an inevitability, and the realities of the human body are simply a set of inefficiencies that can, with enough time and attention, be brought to heel. The culture of Silicon Valley “meritocracy” affords its practitioners cynicism when confronted with realities other than their own: If you were dumb enough to trust new tech, or too poor to have more options, you deserve what you had coming.
Health tech is certainly valuable and ripe for profit. Machines and medical tests used in hospitals for treatment and diagnosis are wildly expensive, but their cost is determined both by demand (high; no one wants to die, and enough people have insurance) and research (expensive, very costly to get right and get through all the hoops of being brought to market). For further evidence, look at the pharmaceutical industry. Investors who sense a rich potential for profit if only they can insert themselves at the right place in the process are not wrong, in that sense.
But the “move fast and break things” mantra that has helped Silicon Valley disrupt countless industries over the last two decades is more dangerous when applied to medical science. The roadblocks that health tech companies run into are not qualitatively different from the ones that all tech companies run into. But when Uber or Airbnb run afoul of their respective laws, the result is abstracted lost money out of someone’s pocket — the government, independent contractors, independent businesses, other segments of the market. When Airbnb keeps viable apartments off the market so they can be rented short-term to its users, the money can theoretically be remanded if someone determines that Airbnb is doing something wrong. The “things” being broken by the current generation of unicorns are regulatory regimes. (Valuable, useful regulatory regimes, to be sure.) The “things” being broken by health start-ups are laws of science and ironclad guidelines for research. When a health start-up “moves fast and breaks things,” it can directly result in the death, dismemberment, and injury of real people. You can’t un-kill someone who died thanks to a bad diagnosis (at least, there’s no start-up hawking that yet).
There’s always room to be wrong in business. But there’s less of that room when it comes to medical treatment. That it appears all the same to even the highest-profile venture capitalists actually turns out to make a lot of sense.
