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Among the bombshell revelations: That many of its blood samples were being tested on standard diagnostic machinery (purchased from another company), rather than the so-called landmark “Edison” machine Holmes claimed to have perfected that the small percentage of tests that were performed on the Edison machines delivered sometimes highly inaccurate results and that the company had vastly overestimated its annual revenue forecasts to attract investors.
#THERANOS FOUNDER ELIZABETH HOLMES SERIES#
The purported fraud began to unravel in the fall of 2015 when a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets revealed serious issues with the company. Balwani has denied these charges, and unlike Holmes, he has not settled with the SEC (Holmes paid a $500,000 SEC fine, but did not admit guilt). Both of them were implicated in the March 2018 Securities and Exchange Commission case (which accused Theranos of perpetrating a “massive fraud”) and the June 2018 federal indictment on wire-tapping charges. Holmes and Balwani were romantically involved, though they kept their relationship a secret from investors and most employees.īalwani was forced out of Theranos in 2016, and his relationship with Holmes ended.
#THERANOS FOUNDER ELIZABETH HOLMES SOFTWARE#
Balwani, a software engineer with no experience in health care or medicine, became the president and chief operating officer of Theranos, managing its day-to-day business. Holmes met Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani while she was studying in China as a teenager. Theranos also pushed for new legislation in several states that would allow the tests to be administered without a doctor’s note.
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One eliminated the need to collect blood samples through traditional needles, instead using a fingerstick that collected tiny amounts of blood into a small tube called a “nanotainer.” Another was a laboratory machine that was able to run dozens of tests on the same, minute amount of blood, testing for everything from diabetes to cancer to heart disease. Theranos soon claimed to have developed several proprietary methods.
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The company was named Theranos, an amalgamation of the words “therapy” and “diagnosis.” One early investor was venture capitalist Tim Draper, the father of a childhood friend and founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Holmes left Stanford in 2004, at age 19, and using her college tuition money as seeding, founded a company called “Real-Time Cures.” Over the next several years, Holmes shifted her focus to creating a new form of blood testing, claiming it was based on her own terror of needles.