SF Poop-Testing Startup, Once Compared to Theranos, Charged in $60 Million Fraud Scheme (sfgate.com) 46
A married pair of San Francisco entrepreneurs were indicted Thursday on multiple federal charges, the latest twist in the saga of a once trendy, now bankrupt fecal matter-testing startup. From a report: Zachary Schulz Apte and Jessica Sunshine Richman, co-founders of defunct microbiome testing company uBiome, are accused of bilking their investors and health insurance providers, federal prosecutors said. They were indicted Thursday on multiple federal charges, including conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit health care fraud and money laundering. Their court appearances have not been scheduled, and it was not immediately clear if they had attorneys who could speak on their behalf. Apte, 36, and Richman, 46, founded uBiome in 2012 as a direct-to-consumer service called "Gut Explorer." Customers would submit a fecal sample that the company analyzed in a laboratory, comparing the consumer's microbiome to others' microbiomes, prosecutors said. The service cost less than $100 initially.
I wanted to read TFA (Score:3)
But it was behind a poopwall. I mean a paywall.
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Well, shit...
in Soviet Russia (Score:2)
Weirdos (Score:2)
In 2018, Richman was even named an "innovator" winner in Goop's "The Greater goop Awards"
Well, that raises a few red flags.
Still, it was Andreessen Horowitz and 8VC who lost money, so that should go in their favour.
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Startups are usually borderline scams anyway, trying to find someone gullible enough to fund them. The trick is to not cross that invisible line that makes it illegal.
Once compared? (Score:3)
Once compared? Seems like the comparison follows right on through. Fraud.
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But it must be cleared up that the fraud they're being charged with is all financial stuff, and nothing to do with the technology. Theranos, however, did not have any technology that worked. I follow Elizabeth Bik on Twitter and support her Patreon who used to work for uBiome. She said she quit working there because they were focused too much on the money, but the testing they developed did work.
On a sidenote, now she spends her time trawling through scientific
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Are you one of those retards who thinks spelling a name with only a one letter difference has some magical property? Dickhead.
I don't post anonymously because I'm not a scared little shit like you.
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Who the hell thought it was okay to accept the submission with a teaser in place of a proper summary and that linked to a paywalled article? We aren't supposed to have to RTFA.
That's OK (Score:3)
They'll get pregnant and the case will be put off for her.
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Courts don't order or force medical procedures to expedite a trial.
'n Regte Kakstorie (Score:2)
Charlatans (Score:2)
So as not to entirely discredit the value of testing human feces, keep in mind that stool sample testing is, and has been, a valuable diagnostic tool when performed by qualified medical personnel.
They can help diagnose many maladies [webmd.com], including infections and even some cancers.
Re:Charlatans (Score:5, Insightful)
But the thing is, they weren't actually providing any actual medical testing. As near as I can tell, they were genetically fingerprinting gut (and other) microbes from their users and using proprietary (red flag) machine learning (another red flag) methods to compare the fingerprints of your bacteria to ones in a proprietary (there it is again) database to provide with a kind of personalized (but proprietary) microbiome profile.
It a sounds science-y AF, while at the same time providing you with guidance that has absolutely no sound scientific basis. It's like the cosmetic company Ponds rebranding to "Ponds Institute" (they did this for real) and running ads with models wearing white coats and peering into microscopes. What they were doing wasn't medicine; it was quackery. Something can be medicine, or it can be a trade secret, but it can't be both.
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"Something can be medicine, or it can be a trade secret, but it can't be both."
If you are saying that a company hiding exclusively behind "patented method" or "trade secret" type claims is likely peddling junk, then I'm right there with you. But my inner pedant notes that there are a lot of trade secrets in medicine, especially diagnostics. For example, even when companies publish clinical results they do not publish a complete specification of how their diagnostic assays were developed or manufactured.
moral of the store (Score:4, Insightful)
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When someone claims to be able to "disrupt" the medical industry, they're likely full of shat.
We have been spending the last year disrupting medicine, by battlefield necessity. Rather than it taking fifteen years to produce a vaccine using the 200 year old hair-of-the-dog methid, we did it in one year using messenger RNA tech. New testing protocols are slashing the time it takes to try out new compounds of any kind. Medicine will never be the same again.
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And a lot of the reason why the lawyers are there is because when stuff goes wrong in medicine, it goes really wrong. Look into what happened with thalidomide and radioactive quackery. All sorts of stuff used to make it to the market that later turned out to be awful.
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https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/1... [cnbc.com]
How could this have failed? (Score:2)
In San Francisco, where the streets are paved with ...
... gold.
Poop tester in deep doodoo, film at 11. (Score:2)
Health startups (Score:2)
It's like none of them has a real business plan based on actual development of a product, and always relies on financial wizardry to downright fraud to try to stay afloat.
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I mean, yes there are. They typically aren't in SV, but a huge number of new drugs are founded by startups whose entire business model is "show enough evidence to get purchased by a giant medical company." The majority fail, but the investors know that going into it.
No. AFAIK, all start ups are run by people interested in the financial
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That is because anyone who is actually passionate about what they doing doesn't refer to themselves as a 'startup' or usually chase venture capital.
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Are there any actual health startups that aren't run by money grubbers and actually have a chance of being useful in the long run?
There are several I've talked to that are doing data analysis with hospitals that have had success in reducing deaths from sepsis. There have been a bunch of medical devices startups.
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Probably true.
Oh Boy (Score:2)
And yet Gwyneth Paltrow carries on selling... (Score:1)
HER CRAP !
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Seems like these people ran into a problem, not because they sell nonsense (which apparently is legal, Whole Foods does it), but because they were getting reimbursed by insurance companies.
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Rip off the consumer: PROFIT
Rip off big business: JAIL
Can we say? (Score:2)
Missed opportunity (Score:5, Funny)
Should've called it Theiranus.
Fecal Samples (Score:2)
Now with the literal crap coming out of Silicon Va (Score:2)