The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Safeway is negotiating to dissolve an unannounced partnership with Theranos — the controversial blood testing company that made Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes into a celebrity billionaire — following questions by the supermarket chain's executives about the accuracy of the finger-prick tests that were the key component of the deal.
The Journal reported that one Safeway executive "worried that Theranos’s finger-prick process was still a work in progress." He said he noticed that Theranos often drew the same person's blood twice: first with a finger prick and then with the traditional method of a needle in the arm. The company also became concerned after one employee got a high result from a Theranos test for a prostate-specific antigen, suggesting that individual may have prostate cancer, but a retest by another lab came back normal.
A Safeway spokesman declined to comment to the Journal about the claims as did Thernos except to say the that the questions and information presented "are inaccurate and defamatory.”
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