Elizabeth Holmes: The Breakthrough of Instant Diagnosis in the Wall Street Journal by James Rago.

Ms. Holmes, a 29-year-old chemical and electrical engineer and entrepreneur, dropped out of Stanford as an undergraduate after founding a life sciences company called Theranos in 2003. Her inventions, which she is discussing in detail here for the first time, could upend the industry of laboratory testing and might change the way we detect and treat disease.

The medical promise of this speed and better information means catching disease in its earliest stages before the onset of symptoms. The company’s analytic tools might also help realize the possibilities of truly personalized medicine, as scientists gain a better understanding of the heterogeneity of disease and how to treat individuals based on their own bodies, not large averages.

Theranos’s tools may also allow doctors to analyze data “longitudinally”—to see trends, clusters and rates of change that they can’t now. Medicine would ask fewer on-off, do-you-have-this-disease-or-not questions, and instead “meaningfully and powerfully answer the question of how to detect and manage these diseases early on,” says Ms. Holmes.

Ms. Holmes says her larger goal is increasing access to testing, including among the uninsured, though she might also have a market-share land grab in mind. For instance, she says Theranos will publish all its retail prices on its website. The company’s X-ray of self-transparency also includes reporting its margins-of-error variations online and on test results and order forms, which few if any labs do now.

This strategy may be inviting a hell of a battle with the health industry, where the incentives are rigged against startups and the empire usually finds a way of striking back. Witness the medical-practice regulations that make medicine a cartel against competitors. Pathologists, lab scientists and technicians won’t be pleased if their jobs go the way of travel agents.

HKO

Health Care regulations tend to solve a problem with policy by considering the problem static. But often we are solving the problem at the same time that policy is enacted. We are seeing many solutions to the problem of health care costs that are driven by innovation and market forces, yet also run counter to the very policies enacted solve the same problem.

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