Theranos, a $9 billion biotech company, wants to make clinical testing cheaper and faster through a new approach to blood testing. Based on the ability to do hundreds of tests from a single finger stick rather than by having to draw vials of blood in a doctor’s office, Theranos could upend the branch of medicine that provides the data used in roughly 70% of medical decisions. Oh, and Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes is the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.

Theranos’ technology is based on microfluidics and has the potential to transform biomedical research by allowing people to glean meaningful data from minuscule amounts of liquid — in this case, blood. Theranos isn’t the only company working with micro fluid techniques. The basic definition of microfluidics is “fluid flow in a channel that has a dimension of less than one millimeter,” according to Ben Moga, president and cofounder of a company called Tasso Inc. His company is working on a device that collects blood samples from people at home who attach the collection vessel to their skin with an adhesive so it can draw a clean sample.

Theranos has drawn skepticism from the scientific community in part because Theranos is cagey about how its tests actually work. “The technology is emerging,” says the University of Chicago’s Yeo, and “some version of it is already out there.” But his question is whether Theranos could have really developed a way to run as many tests as it offers (more than 200 so far, with more to come) on the large scale needed at hospitals and in major labs without relying on already existing machines to automate processing.

“We can perform hundreds of tests, from standard to sophisticated, from a pinprick and tiny sample of blood, and we have performed more than 70 tests from a single tiny sample,” a representative for the company told Business Insider.

But the details of Theranos’ technology aren’t what Holmes usually focuses on when she talks about the company. During interviews Holmes talks more broadly about transforming medicine, she talks about eventually making it possible for people to more easily access data about their health by going and getting a cheap blood test on their own. Instead of just measuring our weight, we could also check our glucose levels.

Holmes has already teamed up with Walgreens to put Theranos labs inside its pharmacies (Theranos is in 41 of more than 8,000 Walgreens so far); Theranos has been conducting tests for GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer and several hospital systems; it recently set up a partnership with Cleveland Clinic; and it earns revenue from the work it does for the US military. Each lab is certified, and it can operate officially in a clinical capacity.

As of July 2015, Theranos held more than 26 issued patents, including patents on wearable blood monitors and influenza virus detection. The term “microfluidics” appears in nine of the 31 patents that appear when searching the US Patent Office for “Theranos,” and Holmes is the the co-inventor on more than 270 global patent applications so it seems as if she’s going to continue to be a person to watch, especially if your products include or require blood tests.

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