The US Securities and Exchange Commission is charging beleaguered biotech company Theranos, its CEO Elizabeth Holmes, and its former president Ramesh Balwani with what it calls “massive fraud.”
Background: A few years ago, Theranos was an up-and-coming startup out of Silicon Valley with a young, charismatic CEO who wanted to revolutionize the blood testing industry. Investors bought into the idea, and by 2014, Theranos was valued at $9 billion. But in 2015, an investigation by the Wall Street Journal raised concerns about the validity of the company’s testing technology.
Bad blood: Theranos set out to make a cheap, simple test that required only a few drops of blood from a finger prick instead of a needle draw. But there’s little evidence that it actually developed the technology it was marketing, especially after a 2016 government report revealed a host of problems at the company.
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