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In 2003, Stanford University student Elizabeth Holmes founded the health care company Theranos. The goal of the company was to revolutionize health care. Beginning with the goal of creating a patch to deliver drugs, the company instead shifted focus to developing a simple and effective method for blood diagnosis. Holmes dropped out of Stanford and began raising millions of dollars in funding. The company claimed that its technology could offer over 240 tests from just a prick of the finger. Test results could be delivered to a patient’s phone in hours, and a single test would cost less than half of the reimbursement rate of Medicare and Medicaid. Blood could be diagnosed easily without the need for many vials of blood drawn from patients’ veins or expensive lab work.

By 2014, the company was valued at $9 billion, of which Holmes held a majority stake. Many investors backed the company based on the promise of the technology. Holmes received glowing profiles in news magazines, was featured on television shows, and presented keynote addresses at tech conferences. But the excitement of investors and the promise of the technology did not translate into success.

Operating largely in a cloak of secrecy, the company could never validate its claims about its blood sampling technology, and many of its lab results went unchecked. In 2015, journalist John Carreyrou investigated the company for an article in The Wall Street Journal. He disclosed problems in the company’s equipment and testing methods. He found that the company did not even use its own technology in tests and often relied on older technology from other companies. Carreyrou also found that the company’s own much-hyped blood sampling technology was not as accurate as Holmes and company had claimed. After publication of Carreyrou’s article, others publicly came forward about the inaccuracy of results they had received from Theranos.

Holmes disagreed with the reporting, saying that Carreyrou had the story wrong. She stated, “This is what happens when you work to change things, and first they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, and then, all of a sudden, you change the world.” Holmes continued to push her company’s claims and her own narrative of personal success. The company continued to show off its technology at conferences.
The Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services opened investigations into Theranos. Under scrutiny, the company faced lawsuits from investors, pharmaceutical partners, and the state of Arizona, where it provided blood testing directly to consumers. In 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Theranos, Holmes, and former president Ramesh Balwani with massive fraud. According to a statement from the SEC, “Theranos, Holmes, and Balwani made numerous false and misleading statements in investor presentations, product demonstrations, and media articles by which they deceived investors into believing that its key product…could conduct comprehensive blood tests from finger drops of blood, revolutionizing the blood-testing industry.”