Latest news with #Theranos
CNN
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- CNN
TikTok's scam sleuth wants to show you how companies are cheating — in a fun way
We live in the golden age of grift. Most of us can't go a day without at least one scammy text about an unpaid toll or a call from an unknown number with a shockingly human-like AI voice on the other side. The scale of the scam onslaught feels like it's part of some Faustian bargain we all entered into: In exchange for the miracle of, like, access to all the world's knowledge and people in our pockets, all the world's knowledge and people similarly have access to us, including the hustlers and the con artists. But way more hustlers, con artists and grifters than any other generation of human beings on Earth has ever had to comprehend before, let alone fend off. Thankfully, all the scam spam doesn't seem to have killed anyone's appetite for the grift as a genre. Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos con? I'll take a book, a podcast, a documentary and at least one serialized streaming project, please. Lifting the veil on a doomsday cult? I'm in, every day, and twice on Sundays. Never forget: We once had two dueling Fyre Festival documentaries on Hulu and Netflix. OK, maybe I'm just a mark for tales of clever cons, exposed. This newsletter is, in part, an outlet for my own fascination with the business hype cycle, which tends to, you know, exaggerate the truth. Or straight-up lie. But (thanks again to the miracle of the internet), I know that I'm not alone. Alex Falcone, an LA-based comedian, is a fellow con connoisseur (a con-noisseur?). Through his TikTok channel, Falcone excels at the art of the two-minute explainer, tackling frauds big (AI) and small (white chocolate). Falcone says he isn't a journalist, but he approaches his work with a similar hunger to peek behind the facade of a thing and expose it. Of his early foray into 'unfun facts,' Falcone says, he wanted to find the intersection of 'a little bit of a wet blanket, but you're OK afterwards… I don't like ruining people's day.' He's hit a nerve on TikTok, where he has more than half a million followers and a popular recurring series called 'Is it a scam? Yep.' (The delivery here is crucial: 'Is-it-a-scamyep!') The schtick is fast-talking facts and plenty of jokes about the companies and people and concepts that are, in one way or another, selling a bill of goods. I caught up with Falcone recently over Zoom to discuss the businesses of grift, comedy and journalism. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. Nightcap: Can you tell me how you got on the scam beat? Alex Falcone: I've always liked the scheme-y underbelly. My grandfather worked in a few different contexts in carnivals, but the bulk of his life he was a pitchman, setting up a table by the midway selling kitchen gadgets and magic tricks. My dad's first job was as a kid standing in the audience while his father demonstrated a magic trick then yelling, 'How did he do that? I'll take two!' I met a con man when I was 16, and he taught me how to do card-cheating and pool-sharking stuff… and, like, mostly didn't use it for evil. I just like knowing how it works. It's sort of like the glass elevator where you see the mechanism behind it. Like, how am I being manipulated? I was working on 'unfun facts,' which is like the opposite of a party trick. My party-ruiner is telling people something that's going to bum them out that they didn't know. And that, it turns out, had a lot of overlap with my interest in things that were slightly crime-y. Nightcap: Why do you think people on TikTok have been so receptive to the scam series? Falcone: I think everybody is vaguely aware that they're walking around in a haunted carnival all the time — that everybody is trying to take advantage of them. If you're at a midway, then you know the basketball hoop is harder than other basketball hoops. Otherwise they wouldn't give you stuffed animals for making one free throw. Why is that? It's because it's 11 feet, and it's not perfectly round… and you know that it's wrong, but then it's still fun to be like, 'Oh, that's how you were getting me.' Nightcap: Do you find yourself, or your audience, experiencing scam fatigue? Falcone: So this is the trick. By slightly redefining what 'scam' means, it allows me to keep finding new ways to talk about things instead of just being bummed out. Whenever I'm tired of talking about AI or crypto, I can do an episode on white chocolate. Nightcap: Ugh, such a scam! Falcone: It's disgusting! It was originally invented as a medical coating for pills. And then they were like, 'we can sell this because we have all this extra cocoa butter lying around, and we can mix it with palm oil, which we've cut down the rainforest to make, and now we have too much of it.' Every step of that is terrifying, but also it tastes like cat vomit. So that's inherently funny. That's my palate cleanser. I have an escape valve for a lot of this. Actually, if you hadn't asked that, I would have asked you the same question… How do you avoid getting bummed out by this? Are all of your colleagues just sort of zombie-brained now? Nightcap: There's a bit of zombie-brain going around. I will say I spend a good amount of time — like a shameful amount of time — disassociating on TikTok. Falcone: I think that's great… There are a lot of problems with the way algorithms work, but one of the things that's great is you can just create an account with a new name, a fresh algorithm, and decide this algorithm is just for escapism. I did a video about algorithms a while ago, and so as a demonstration I decided to make an account for videos about bunnies. In TikTok, it took me 15 minutes before the algorithm was just rabbits and nothing else… So that is one of the ways that I've kept myself sane — having multiple algorithms that I play with depending on my mood. Having a rabbit account as a side project is really fun. Nightcap: You've covered AI hype and marketing a few times… Falcone: It feels like there's an emperor-has-no clothes situation — that we're all just waiting for somebody to be like, Oh, wait, it's bad! Oh… we thought so, and then you told us we were dumb for thinking that it's not working, but it is actually bad. Nightcap: How do you source your scam material? Falcone: I have what I think of as the mainline scam, where the answer is 'yep,' and I just have a backlog of those. Occasionally, stuff from friends pops up. Somebody mentioned to me the other day that the Oscars were originally started to prevent actors from unionizing, which I assumed couldn't possibly be true. But it turns out, [Louis B. Mayer] of MGM was the founder of the academy, and that was what he said he was doing. (Editor's note: This checks out.) The user submissions have a separate path, because the answer to 'Is it a scam?' can sometimes be 'no.' Nightcap: I was so nervous when I came across one of your videos about Costco. Please don't ruin Costco! Falcone: Costco was a great 'nope.' The thing about Costco, and this is true of a lot of these things, is it's not a scam, but it's definitely a scheme. You have to pay to shop, which is such a crazy business model. You pay to walk in the door of a store where everything still costs money. That's definitely a scheme. But I don't think it's a scam. Now I have 100-150 messages every day on the different platforms, asking 'can you look into this thing for me' … But the main source is just things that I'm generally mad about in my own life. I have plenty of those to keep this going for another couple years.
CNN
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- CNN
TikTok's scam sleuth wants to show you how companies are cheating — in a fun way
We live in the golden age of grift. Most of us can't go a day without at least one scammy text about an unpaid toll or a call from an unknown number with a shockingly human-like AI voice on the other side. The scale of the scam onslaught feels like it's part of some Faustian bargain we all entered into: In exchange for the miracle of, like, access to all the world's knowledge and people in our pockets, all the world's knowledge and people similarly have access to us, including the hustlers and the con artists. But way more hustlers, con artists and grifters than any other generation of human beings on Earth has ever had to comprehend before, let alone fend off. Thankfully, all the scam spam doesn't seem to have killed anyone's appetite for the grift as a genre. Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos con? I'll take a book, a podcast, a documentary and at least one serialized streaming project, please. Lifting the veil on a doomsday cult? I'm in, every day, and twice on Sundays. Never forget: We once had two dueling Fyre Festival documentaries on Hulu and Netflix. OK, maybe I'm just a mark for tales of clever cons, exposed. This newsletter is, in part, an outlet for my own fascination with the business hype cycle, which tends to, you know, exaggerate the truth. Or straight-up lie. But (thanks again to the miracle of the internet), I know that I'm not alone. Alex Falcone, an LA-based comedian, is a fellow con connoisseur (a con-noisseur?). Through his TikTok channel, Falcone excels at the art of the two-minute explainer, tackling frauds big (AI) and small (white chocolate). Falcone says he isn't a journalist, but he approaches his work with a similar hunger to peek behind the facade of a thing and expose it. Of his early foray into 'unfun facts,' Falcone says, he wanted to find the intersection of 'a little bit of a wet blanket, but you're OK afterwards… I don't like ruining people's day.' He's hit a nerve on TikTok, where he has more than half a million followers and a popular recurring series called 'Is it a scam? Yep.' (The delivery here is crucial: 'Is-it-a-scamyep!') The schtick is fast-talking facts and plenty of jokes about the companies and people and concepts that are, in one way or another, selling a bill of goods. I caught up with Falcone recently over Zoom to discuss the businesses of grift, comedy and journalism. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. Nightcap: Can you tell me how you got on the scam beat? Alex Falcone: I've always liked the scheme-y underbelly. My grandfather worked in a few different contexts in carnivals, but the bulk of his life he was a pitchman, setting up a table by the midway selling kitchen gadgets and magic tricks. My dad's first job was as a kid standing in the audience while his father demonstrated a magic trick then yelling, 'How did he do that? I'll take two!' I met a con man when I was 16, and he taught me how to do card-cheating and pool-sharking stuff… and, like, mostly didn't use it for evil. I just like knowing how it works. It's sort of like the glass elevator where you see the mechanism behind it. Like, how am I being manipulated? I was working on 'unfun facts,' which is like the opposite of a party trick. My party-ruiner is telling people something that's going to bum them out that they didn't know. And that, it turns out, had a lot of overlap with my interest in things that were slightly crime-y. Nightcap: Why do you think people on TikTok have been so receptive to the scam series? Falcone: I think everybody is vaguely aware that they're walking around in a haunted carnival all the time — that everybody is trying to take advantage of them. If you're at a midway, then you know the basketball hoop is harder than other basketball hoops. Otherwise they wouldn't give you stuffed animals for making one free throw. Why is that? It's because it's 11 feet, and it's not perfectly round… and you know that it's wrong, but then it's still fun to be like, 'Oh, that's how you were getting me.' Nightcap: Do you find yourself, or your audience, experiencing scam fatigue? Falcone: So this is the trick. By slightly redefining what 'scam' means, it allows me to keep finding new ways to talk about things instead of just being bummed out. Whenever I'm tired of talking about AI or crypto, I can do an episode on white chocolate. Nightcap: Ugh, such a scam! Falcone: It's disgusting! It was originally invented as a medical coating for pills. And then they were like, 'we can sell this because we have all this extra cocoa butter lying around, and we can mix it with palm oil, which we've cut down the rainforest to make, and now we have too much of it.' Every step of that is terrifying, but also it tastes like cat vomit. So that's inherently funny. That's my palate cleanser. I have an escape valve for a lot of this. Actually, if you hadn't asked that, I would have asked you the same question… How do you avoid getting bummed out by this? Are all of your colleagues just sort of zombie-brained now? Nightcap: There's a bit of zombie-brain going around. I will say I spend a good amount of time — like a shameful amount of time — disassociating on TikTok. Falcone: I think that's great… There are a lot of problems with the way algorithms work, but one of the things that's great is you can just create an account with a new name, a fresh algorithm, and decide this algorithm is just for escapism. I did a video about algorithms a while ago, and so as a demonstration I decided to make an account for videos about bunnies. In TikTok, it took me 15 minutes before the algorithm was just rabbits and nothing else… So that is one of the ways that I've kept myself sane — having multiple algorithms that I play with depending on my mood. Having a rabbit account as a side project is really fun. Nightcap: You've covered AI hype and marketing a few times… Falcone: It feels like there's an emperor-has-no clothes situation — that we're all just waiting for somebody to be like, Oh, wait, it's bad! Oh… we thought so, and then you told us we were dumb for thinking that it's not working, but it is actually bad. Nightcap: How do you source your scam material? Falcone: I have what I think of as the mainline scam, where the answer is 'yep,' and I just have a backlog of those. Occasionally, stuff from friends pops up. Somebody mentioned to me the other day that the Oscars were originally started to prevent actors from unionizing, which I assumed couldn't possibly be true. But it turns out, [Louis B. Mayer] of MGM was the founder of the academy, and that was what he said he was doing. (Editor's note: This checks out.) The user submissions have a separate path, because the answer to 'Is it a scam?' can sometimes be 'no.' Nightcap: I was so nervous when I came across one of your videos about Costco. Please don't ruin Costco! Falcone: Costco was a great 'nope.' The thing about Costco, and this is true of a lot of these things, is it's not a scam, but it's definitely a scheme. You have to pay to shop, which is such a crazy business model. You pay to walk in the door of a store where everything still costs money. That's definitely a scheme. But I don't think it's a scam. Now I have 100-150 messages every day on the different platforms, asking 'can you look into this thing for me' … But the main source is just things that I'm generally mad about in my own life. I have plenty of those to keep this going for another couple years.
CNN
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- CNN
TikTok's scam sleuth wants to show you how companies are cheating — in a fun way
We live in the golden age of grift. Most of us can't go a day without at least one scammy text about an unpaid toll or a call from an unknown number with a shockingly human-like AI voice on the other side. The scale of the scam onslaught feels like it's part of some Faustian bargain we all entered into: In exchange for the miracle of, like, access to all the world's knowledge and people in our pockets, all the world's knowledge and people similarly have access to us, including the hustlers and the con artists. But way more hustlers, con artists and grifters than any other generation of human beings on Earth has ever had to comprehend before, let alone fend off. Thankfully, all the scam spam doesn't seem to have killed anyone's appetite for the grift as a genre. Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos con? I'll take a book, a podcast, a documentary and at least one serialized streaming project, please. Lifting the veil on a doomsday cult? I'm in, every day, and twice on Sundays. Never forget: We once had two dueling Fyre Festival documentaries on Hulu and Netflix. OK, maybe I'm just a mark for tales of clever cons, exposed. This newsletter is, in part, an outlet for my own fascination with the business hype cycle, which tends to, you know, exaggerate the truth. Or straight-up lie. But (thanks again to the miracle of the internet), I know that I'm not alone. Alex Falcone, an LA-based comedian, is a fellow con connoisseur (a con-noisseur?). Through his TikTok channel, Falcone excels at the art of the two-minute explainer, tackling frauds big (AI) and small (white chocolate). Falcone says he isn't a journalist, but he approaches his work with a similar hunger to peek behind the facade of a thing and expose it. Of his early foray into 'unfun facts,' Falcone says, he wanted to find the intersection of 'a little bit of a wet blanket, but you're OK afterwards… I don't like ruining people's day.' He's hit a nerve on TikTok, where he has more than half a million followers and a popular recurring series called 'Is it a scam? Yep.' (The delivery here is crucial: 'Is-it-a-scamyep!') The schtick is fast-talking facts and plenty of jokes about the companies and people and concepts that are, in one way or another, selling a bill of goods. I caught up with Falcone recently over Zoom to discuss the businesses of grift, comedy and journalism. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. Nightcap: Can you tell me how you got on the scam beat? Alex Falcone: I've always liked the scheme-y underbelly. My grandfather worked in a few different contexts in carnivals, but the bulk of his life he was a pitchman, setting up a table by the midway selling kitchen gadgets and magic tricks. My dad's first job was as a kid standing in the audience while his father demonstrated a magic trick then yelling, 'How did he do that? I'll take two!' I met a con man when I was 16, and he taught me how to do card-cheating and pool-sharking stuff… and, like, mostly didn't use it for evil. I just like knowing how it works. It's sort of like the glass elevator where you see the mechanism behind it. Like, how am I being manipulated? I was working on 'unfun facts,' which is like the opposite of a party trick. My party-ruiner is telling people something that's going to bum them out that they didn't know. And that, it turns out, had a lot of overlap with my interest in things that were slightly crime-y. Nightcap: Why do you think people on TikTok have been so receptive to the scam series? Falcone: I think everybody is vaguely aware that they're walking around in a haunted carnival all the time — that everybody is trying to take advantage of them. If you're at a midway, then you know the basketball hoop is harder than other basketball hoops. Otherwise they wouldn't give you stuffed animals for making one free throw. Why is that? It's because it's 11 feet, and it's not perfectly round… and you know that it's wrong, but then it's still fun to be like, 'Oh, that's how you were getting me.' Nightcap: Do you find yourself, or your audience, experiencing scam fatigue? Falcone: So this is the trick. By slightly redefining what 'scam' means, it allows me to keep finding new ways to talk about things instead of just being bummed out. Whenever I'm tired of talking about AI or crypto, I can do an episode on white chocolate. Nightcap: Ugh, such a scam! Falcone: It's disgusting! It was originally invented as a medical coating for pills. And then they were like, 'we can sell this because we have all this extra cocoa butter lying around, and we can mix it with palm oil, which we've cut down the rainforest to make, and now we have too much of it.' Every step of that is terrifying, but also it tastes like cat vomit. So that's inherently funny. That's my palate cleanser. I have an escape valve for a lot of this. Actually, if you hadn't asked that, I would have asked you the same question… How do you avoid getting bummed out by this? Are all of your colleagues just sort of zombie-brained now? Nightcap: There's a bit of zombie-brain going around. I will say I spend a good amount of time — like a shameful amount of time — disassociating on TikTok. Falcone: I think that's great… There are a lot of problems with the way algorithms work, but one of the things that's great is you can just create an account with a new name, a fresh algorithm, and decide this algorithm is just for escapism. I did a video about algorithms a while ago, and so as a demonstration I decided to make an account for videos about bunnies. In TikTok, it took me 15 minutes before the algorithm was just rabbits and nothing else… So that is one of the ways that I've kept myself sane — having multiple algorithms that I play with depending on my mood. Having a rabbit account as a side project is really fun. Nightcap: You've covered AI hype and marketing a few times… Falcone: It feels like there's an emperor-has-no clothes situation — that we're all just waiting for somebody to be like, Oh, wait, it's bad! Oh… we thought so, and then you told us we were dumb for thinking that it's not working, but it is actually bad. Nightcap: How do you source your scam material? Falcone: I have what I think of as the mainline scam, where the answer is 'yep,' and I just have a backlog of those. Occasionally, stuff from friends pops up. Somebody mentioned to me the other day that the Oscars were originally started to prevent actors from unionizing, which I assumed couldn't possibly be true. But it turns out, [Louis B. Mayer] of MGM was the founder of the academy, and that was what he said he was doing. (Editor's note: This checks out.) The user submissions have a separate path, because the answer to 'Is it a scam?' can sometimes be 'no.' Nightcap: I was so nervous when I came across one of your videos about Costco. Please don't ruin Costco! Falcone: Costco was a great 'nope.' The thing about Costco, and this is true of a lot of these things, is it's not a scam, but it's definitely a scheme. You have to pay to shop, which is such a crazy business model. You pay to walk in the door of a store where everything still costs money. That's definitely a scheme. But I don't think it's a scam. Now I have 100-150 messages every day on the different platforms, asking 'can you look into this thing for me' … But the main source is just things that I'm generally mad about in my own life. I have plenty of those to keep this going for another couple years.
Forbes
03-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
How Assuming Success By Association Destroys Teams, Trust, And Judgment
There's a reason the Theranos scandal fooled so many people. It looked promising on the surface. The board was stacked with recognizable names, and the founder went to Stanford, so big-name investors bought in. That led to people turning off their critical thinking and relying on assuming success by association. As Guy Kawasaki, Chief Evangelist at Canva, told me when I interviewed him, "Fundamentally, we're all lazy. Instead of figuring something out, we're looking for proxies." That's how teams lose direction, trust gets misplaced, and judgment breaks down. Why write about Theranos now? Because many of the mistakes made then continue to be made by people who continue to assume. As you might have heard, when we assume... well, you probably know the rest. When Guy used the word proxy, I remember thinking at the time, it wasn't a term I heard very often. As he explained, it became clear that when people assume someone is smart or capable just because of who they know or where they went to school, they fall into what Guy called "success by association." It's a shortcut that causes decision-makers to overvalue pedigree and overlook performance. In my research on curiosity, one of the biggest inhibitors I identified is assumption. When people believe they already know the answer, they stop exploring. When teams rely on a person's background instead of their behavior, they stop thinking, and that's when trust breaks down and companies get stuck in status-quo ways. I remember when I interviewed Kawasaki, how he shared what it was like working with Steve Jobs at Apple. He called him brilliant, but not exactly empathetic. Because Jobs was successful, people assumed anything tied to him would succeed. That's where trust can become fragile if leaders start to chase proxies instead of performance. A Stanford degree? Must be smart. Backed by Sequoia? Must be the next big thing. When organizations confuse validation with actual verification, they default to what's easy. It's more comfortable to trust a resume than to ask hard questions. But when curiosity disappears from decision-making, teams follow myths, not metrics. And that leads to blind spots. Trust comes from being seen for who you are, not who you know. When teams start to think promotions or opportunities go to the most connected rather than the most capable, they stop believing in fairness. That erodes trust, and over time, it kills curiosity. I've worked with companies where talented employees raised valid concerns, but those were brushed aside because the source wasn't 'senior' enough. When teams feel like their input doesn't matter, they stop offering it. Eventually, the people with the most valuable insights are silent. And without challenge, progress stalls. To prevent trust breakdowns, start by questioning your own assumptions. Instead of asking where someone studied, ask how they've solved problems. Instead of saying they're connected, ask how they think under pressure. Strong teams create space for disagreement. They invite people from different perspectives into the conversation. They ask, 'What could go wrong?' not just 'Who's behind it?' Curiosity builds trust through transparency. Guy described how venture capital often becomes herd mentality. 'If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me' is a mindset that replaces scrutiny with safety. But that's not trust; it's inertia. In the Theranos case, it led to disaster because no one wanted to be the outlier who asked the wrong question. Every team needs a balance of optimism and skepticism. Curiosity helps with understanding. When leaders ask better questions, they protect their teams from falling into groupthink. When team members are encouraged to explore different views, trust strengthens. Kawasaki shared that many entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley over promise because they lack pattern recognition. They haven't been through the process before. But the investors listening to them often don't dig deeper. They trust the proxy, meaning relying more on where someone worked or who's backing them, instead of asking about the real risks. Teams require more reflection. Rather than focusing on who you know, focus on how you think. Use curiosity to drive that thinking, and that will build trust. Curiosity is what keeps judgment sharp. It helps leaders see past the surface. It helps teams move from assumptions to understanding. And it builds trust, because when people ask questions, they show that they care enough to think. The bottom line is that teams fall apart from a lack of questioning. If you want to protect performance, rebuild trust, and lead a stronger team, stop relying on proxies. Start asking better questions. That's where trust begins, and that's how smart teams stay successful.
Hans India
20-05-2025
- Health
- Hans India
A few drops of blood, saliva or urine can help detect illnesses
In the 2000s, biotech company Theranos promised to revolutionise blood testing. Founder Elizabeth Holmes claimed Theranos technology could perform hundreds of tests using just a finger-prick drop of blood. If true, their diagnostics would be faster, cheaper and more accessible. Theranos raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors and was valued at more than $nine billion in 2015. However, the technology never worked, leading to one of the biggest scandals in biotech history. Theranos was secretly using traditional machines to run many tests, then claiming the results came from its own (non-functional) device. Holmes was eventually convicted of fraud and sentenced to 11 years in prison. Today, a new startup, Haemanthus, claims to have developed a similar technology. Co-founded by Billy Evans (Holmes' partner), this new company says it can detect and diagnose illnesses using tiny amounts of blood, urine, or even saliva. While technology has advanced since Theranos' time, it's important to consider these claims carefully. Clinicians and lab techs can currently detect many conditions with blood, and some with urine or saliva. These are important tools in modern medicine. However, the volumes required are usually much greater than a few drops or a dab. What can blood detect? Blood circulates through all organs, transporting cells, nutrients, hormones and waste products. Blood tests collect several millilitres of blood from a vein and send this to a laboratory for analysis. Blood tests can check if a person has signs of infection or disease, to monitor organ function, or to show how a person is responding to medical treatment. Blood tests are widely used to monitor heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, or deficiencies in iron or vitamins. A significant proportion of medical decisions are based on laboratory analysis of blood tests. Making them more affordable and accessible would have great benefits. What about urine? Urine is produced by the kidneys and contains waste filtered from the blood. The colour and composition of urine gives you a snapshot of any problems the body might be trying to fix. Urine analysis can detect urinary tract infections, kidney disorders, diabetes and liver diseases by measuring sugars, proteins and cells. As urine tests are non-invasive and easy to administer, they can be used to quickly screen for some conditions. However, factors such as how much you've had to drink and what you've eaten can influence urine composition, potentially affecting test results. Saliva can also be used for diagnoses Saliva is the clear, watery liquid produced by salivary glands in the mouth. It's mostly water (around 99 per cent), but also contains various substances such as hormones, antibodies, enzymes, DNA, RNA and metabolites. Saliva testing is already used in clinical settings to detect HIV antibodies, monitor levels of cortisol (a marker of stress) and to diagnose viral infections such as Covid-19. The potential of saliva as another non-invasive diagnostic tool is growing, especially as researchers identify more markers of disease that it can contain. However, saliva production varies between individuals. The composition of saliva can be impacted by what you eat and drink, the time of day, or even stress. These variations can limit how consistent and reliable saliva can be for making a diagnosis. But how much of it do you need? While diagnosing diseases using bodily fluids isn't new, Haemanthus and other startups differentiate themselves by aiming (and claiming) to need only small amounts for multiple tests: a drop of blood, a swab of saliva, or a few milliliters of urine. This would mean faster, cheaper, more convenient tests that cause less discomfort. But there are physical limitations of small samples. Many diagnostic markers (called biomarkers) are only present in very low amounts in our body fluids. When the sample amount decreases, so will biomarkers, thereby making it difficult to detect them reliably. This is particularly true for biomarkers such as hormones, cancer markers, or early-stage disease indicators. What can you detect with a few drops? Of course, some conditions can be diagnosed using small samples, but generally only one condition is tested for with each small sample, unlike the claims of companies like Theranos. Finger-prick blood samples, for example, can monitor blood glucose levels of people with diabetes. Small urine samples can detect urinary tract infections, but not all types of infections at once. The specific biomarkers for these conditions can be reliably detectable in small amounts of fluid. To diagnose more complex conditions, or even unknown conditions, multiple tests may be required, each needing different sample preparations. This requires both volume and precision – two things tests with small sample volumes struggle to deliver. What happens next? While the idea of diagnosing illnesses with small fluid samples is promising, especially for remote or resource-limited settings, the science suggests we should be cautious. Most human diseases are complicated, and we usually need comprehensive testing approaches to diagnose them. Relying only on small fluid samples could lead to misdiagnosis, delayed treatments, or unnecessary interventions. Innovations in biosensor technology, machine learning algorithms and biomarker discovery continue to advance the field. And one day, fast and reliable small volume testing may be possible. However, a lot more peer-reviewed research and regulatory approvals will be essential to ensure patient safety and diagnostic accuracy. (The writers are from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research)
