The founder and former CEO of Theranos, an upstart biotech company specializing in using blood to discover illnesses in patients, has been found guilty on four of 11 charges of defrauding the company’s investors and patients by being dishonest about the accuracy of the technology they were using.
According to NPR, Holmes is facing up to 20 years in prison after the four-month federal trial found the 37-year-old guilty of defrauding patients and investors at the peak of Theranos’ success when she knew the machines they were using were not all accurate.
Holmes founded the company after she dropped out of Standford at 19. Theranos' call to success was that it promoted its blood and lab tests to be ahead of its time by only needing one to two drops of a patient's blood to scan for hundreds of diseases. Faulty results from these machines rolled out into Walgreens threw Theranos into hot water. One patient testified that their machine said that she would have a miscarriage when she was having a completely healthy pregnancy, while another patient said that a test told her that her cancer had returned when it did not.
Holmes is claiming that her ex-boyfriend and former deputy at Theranos, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, was sexually abusive to her during their relationship and that’s what led her to defraud investors and patients. Holmes also said that the scientists who worked for the company were closer to the machines than she was, so they should be at fault.
She was not found guilty of four other charges of defrauding, and the jury must return to deliberate on the final three charges against her. Theranos was once estimated to be worth $9 billion, but has since dropped after investors were misled. Holmes’ lawyers have also said that they plan to appeal the charges.
