The Year Babson Showed Us a 'BetterWay' to Do Blood TestingThe Year Babson Showed Us a 'BetterWay' to Do Blood Testing

During almost every conversation the founders of Babson Diagnostics have, Theranos comes into the picture.

“When somebody is trying to understand what we’re doing, they always want to know how this compares to Theranos,” Eric Olson, founder, chief operating officer, and chairman at Babson, told MD+DI. “But we realized early on that the way that you deal with that is through science and through transparency. The question isn’t are we the same type of company as Theranos; we obviously are not. But it’s not enough to just say that we’re different; in this industry, you have to prove it.”

And proving it is exactly what the company has done and continues to do. That’s why MD+DI editors chose Babson Diagnostics as this year’s Medtech Company of the Year out of a total of 10 finalists. We’ll find out tomorrow if our readers agreed with our choice or threw their support behind another company on the list.

How Babson spun out of Siemens to seek a ‘BetterWay’

BetterWay is blood testing reimagined: convenient and affordable fingertip collection at local pharmacies. IMAGE COURTESY OF BABSON DIAGNOSTICS

For all its faults, Theranos did get one thing right: the now-defunct company proved that people want the choice of affordable blood testing done in convenient retail pharmacies with just a small amount of blood collected from their fingertip. BetterWay is doing exactly that but with the science to back it up.

In 2015, shortly before the Theranos story turned from fairytale to cautionary tale for the entire medtech industry, two colleagues at Siemens Healthineers began talking about how the company could bring a better blood testing solution to market.

David Stein and Eric Olson began working with BD (Becton, Dickinson) on the sample collection end of the new venture, and Siemens spun the project out. Olson left Siemens with a term sheet in hand and founded Babson Diagnostics. Siemens spun out licensing exclusivity and a cash investment into Babson, and BD also signed exclusive agreements. But the partnership didn’t stop there.

In October, BD invested in Babson, strengthening its long-term strategic partnership to expand access to blood testing.

“BD and Siemens Healthineers have both been really influential partners, and having leaders in the industry that back this has been awesome; it’s been really important to our success,” Olson said.

BetterWay is currently only available in Austin, TX, but will be available outside of Austin “in the very near future,” Olson said, although he was unable to disclose any specifics.

Olson said the company will have multiple announcements coming up that will detail new retail partnerships, new geographies where BetterWay will be available, some new products, and even new business models.

Navigating skepticism in a post-Theranos blood testing industry

Many outsiders said that what Babson is doing couldn’t be done, and yet this year the company successfully launched BetterWay in Austin, TX. So, what does Olson say to the people who doubted the company from the beginning?

“Had you asked me 10 or 20 years ago, I would have also been a skeptic,” Olson said in a previous interview with MD+DI. “And I think that skepticism is super healthy and that's what we need in diagnostics because it's an industry where there has been a lot of frustration that, ‘Can't we do better than this?’ We all feel, in the diagnostics industry, that there does have to be a better way somewhere but we've seen so many different attempts to make things better and you know all of the different efforts to get us from where we are, which we kind of collectively see as the dark ages, to the Tricorder from Star Trek ... we know there's going to be many steps between here and there and we've seen so many people try to skip steps and for it to just turn out to be nothing, for it to turn out to be false or to make compromises that are just not reasonable compromises to make.”

As an industry veteran who has seen so many of these fly-by-night diagnostics companies come and go, Olson said it is easy to become disillusioned.

“So, I don't have any objections to people being skeptical. I think skeptical is what we need, because a lack of skepticism is what let too many things get through the cracks,” he said. "But I would say the approach that we took, the advantage of knowing that skepticism is going to be rampant—and should be rampant—is a science-first approach where rather than exaggerating the things to come, we produced the data from the clinical studies that are needed to evaluate whether what we're doing works.”

And the company has been highly transparent in its public materials, with its partners, and to share all the clinical data it has generated through clinical studies.

“For a skeptic, deciding whether something works is not a matter of being persuaded that it works,” Olson said. “It's not persuasion, it's data.”