On the 3rd January of this year, Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the now-defunct health technology company Theranos, was convicted of defrauding investors on several counts. Holmes, a one-time star entrepreneur of Silicon Valley who was touted as the Steve Jobs of the medical field and famous for sporting black turtlenecks —designed by Issey Miyake, the Japanese couturier whose black-mock turtlenecks had been favoured by Steve Jobs— followed the “fake it until you make it” or “move fast and break things” mantra of success until she came a cropper amid shocking revelations of her fraudulent blood-testing startup. Before Holmes could ‘make it’, the law caught up with her sham, leading to her indictment on grounds of criminal fraud. She faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a fine of $50,000, plus restitution, for the conspiracy to mislead investors and government and for each count of criminal fraud.
Elizabeth Holmes launched her unicorn startup Theranos in 2003. This Silicon Valley private health care and life sciences company professed to revolutionize medical laboratory blood testing through allegedly innovative methods for drawing and testing blood, and interpreting the resulting patient data. Taking advantage of the layman’s fear of and aversion to needles and the vials of blood typically required for traditional diagnostic lab testing, Theranos claimed to have developed a novel method for drawing only a few drops of capillary blood from a fingerprick, using a small lancet to collect and store the blood in a proprietary device called the ‘nanotainer’. Theranos also touted, in a 2013 press release, its use of “blood sample[s] as small as a few drops-1/1000th the size of a typical blood draw.”
Please click here to read the full article by Manish Kumar Jha, published in BW Legal World.
Manish’s key focus area is civil, commercial, and criminal litigation. Manish specialises in arbitration also.