マツモトキヨシで血液検査

Googleのmoonshotの取り組みの一つとしてnanoparticles による診断がありました。“reactive to proactive”という流れは、センサーなどのIoTやビッグデータなどで可能になる世界のようですよね。

Conrad, who as head of Google X Life Sciences oversees the project, says it could change medicine from “reactive to proactive.” Today we go to the doctor when we are ill, he says. It’s as if we changed the oil in a car only when the car breaks down. “There has to be a better way,” Conrad says.

そんな試みをすでに事業化している人がいるんですね。Elizabeth Holmesは若干３０才。画期的な血液検査を進める会社Theranosを１９才で立ち上げFortuneのBusiness Persons of the Yearでは１４位にランクインされています。同い年のMark Zuckerbergが１３位ですから、ものすごいことだと思います

14
Elizabeth Holmes
Company Theranos
Title Founder and CEO
In a June Fortune cover story, 30-year-old Elizabeth Holmes finally lifted the veil on the secretive, disruptive blood-analytics company she founded in 2003 when she was just 19. The rapidly expanding firm, Theranos, can perform hundreds of diagnostic tests using just a few drops of blood painlessly drawn from a pricked finger—while charging just a quarter to a tenth of what the incumbents do. Holmes still owns over half the stock in Theranos, which investors value at more than $9 billion and which now employs more than 700 people. —Roger Parloff

今週号のNew Yorkerでも彼女を取り上げていました。IT業界に詳しいKen Aulettaによるものです。わずか数滴の血液で検査できるようになる画期的方法を推進している会社のようです。

Annals of Innovation DECEMBER 15, 2014 ISSUE
Blood, Simpler
One woman’s drive to upend medical testing.
BY KEN AULETTA

いろいろな側面からこの企業を説明してくれている記事です。企業するといっても、適切なアドバイザー、協力者がいないと成功できないでしょう。驚きは役員の顔ぶれです。

Theranos owes its success in part to its high-powered board, which Holmes corralled with the help of George Shultz, a Palo Alto resident, who, in his long career, has held four Cabinet positions, including Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State. Shultz is ninety-three and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution; Holmes first met him in 2011. “It was one of those scheduled ten-minute meetings that turn into a two-hour meeting,” she said.

Shultz agreed to join the board, and he meets with Holmes weekly. He introduced her to several other current board members: Bill Frist, a trained cardiac surgeon and former Senate Republican Majority Leader; Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State; Sam Nunn, a former Democratic senator and chairman of the Armed Services Committee; William J. Perry, the former Defense Secretary; and Richard Kovacevich, a former C.E.O. and chairman of Wells Fargo. All receive stock options from the company, among other forms of compensation. Kissinger, who is ninety-one, told me that Holmes “has a sort of ethereal quality—that is to say, she looks like nineteen. And you say to yourself, ‘How is she ever going to run this?’ ” She does so, he said, “by intellectual dominance; she knows the subject.”

コスト削減の鍵のひとつにソフトウエアによる自動化もあるようです。

A key to the company’s success was the hiring of Sunny Balwani, a software engineer, now forty-nine, whom Holmes had met in Beijing the summer after her senior year of high school. At the time, he was getting an M.B.A. from Berkeley. He had worked at Lotus and at Microsoft and been a successful entrepreneur, and in 2004 he began graduate studies in computer science at Stanford. He and Holmes spoke often, and they shared a belief that software, not just chemistry or biology, mattered. If Theranos was going to be able to analyze a few drops of blood, engineers would have to develop the software to do it. In 2009, Balwani joined as C.O.O. and president. “Our platform is about automation,” he says. “We have automated the process from start to finish.”

Fortuneも６月号で彼女を特集していました。経営面や彼女の育ちなどについてはこちらの記事の方が詳しく書いています。あと、実際の検査機器などの写真もあってわかりやすいです。



This CEO is out for blood
by Roger Parloff @rparloff JUNE 12, 2014, 7:37 AM EST

This CEO is out for bloodという記事タイトルですが、「〜に復讐する」といったイディオムのようです。日本語でいう「血に飢えている」みたいな感じでしょうか。

（オックスフォード）
be after/out for somebody's blood
(informal, often humorous) to be angry with somebody and want to hurt or punish them

このような企業の立ち上げは注射をして血を抜き取るのが嫌いな個人的な体験に根ざしている部分もあるようで、あながち的外れなイディオムではないようです。

“The concept of sticking a needle into you and sucking your blood out,” Holmes says, has always been profoundly disturbing to her. As a child, she says, “when I knew I needed to get a test, I would really be focused on that for weeks in advance.” As an adult, she refused to get them. In fact, the last time she endured a venipuncture was in 2007, she says, when her board demanded that she get key-man insurance.