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  • CORRESPONDENCE

Theranos’s lesson for investors: speak to lab workers

  1. Richard D. Unwin

    1. University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.

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  2. Daniela S. Couto

    1. BioGeneration Ventures, Naarden, the Netherlands.

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  3. Simon J. Clark

    1. Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.

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The fraud conviction of Elizabeth Holmes, the chief executive of the now-defunct US biotechnology company Theranos in Palo Alto, California, highlights the need for early peer review of scientific data from start-up companies (Nature 601, 173–174; 2022). But that is unlikely to happen in the highly secretive start-up world, in which investment is based on the only real asset of value — intellectual property and know-how. So how can investors perform suitable due diligence? In our view, they must speak directly to the engineers and scientists expected to deliver on breakthrough technologies.

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Nature 601, 508 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00167-7

Competing Interests

R.D.U. and S.J.C. are co-founders of, and shareholders in, the biotech spin-out company Complement Therapeutics. D.S.C is employed by BioGeneration Ventures, which invests in biotech ventures.

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