Theranos' Holmes admits she slapped Big Pharma logos on lab reports to boost her biz Theranos boss Elizabeth Holmes admitted in court this week she personally added Pfizer and Schering-Plough logos to her startup's presentations while trying to seal a deal with Walgreens. Giving testimony on Tuesday during her fraud trial, the one-time chief exec damningly revealed it was her idea to place the pair of Big …
Framed as an admission of innocence: "It never occurred to me that it was wrong, I was only trying to be nice" said the attractive, young, blond lady who obviously would never defraud anyone...
Hopefully the jury won't see it quite like that.
Paris, obviously, because if cross questioning gets mean there will be tears... "nasty man made me do it".
I've got pharmaceuticals from many of the worlds leading manufacturers coursing through my veins as we speak. And very evenly balanced I feel as a result. Couple that with my STEM degree and I claim expert witness status.
[In the kingdom of the blonde, this tie-dyed girl is king]
I'm surprised the COTs vendors aren't jumping in here and suing the crap out of her and the rest, I'm *fairly* sure there are legal bits in purchase contracts about modifying the equipment (at least in terms of things like blood testing equipment, c.f. John Deere and all)
So if the testing requires less blood wouldn't this be mentioned to the operators, if not then it's just more blood being flushed out at the end of the cycle.
Ethically, if less blood is needed for a test then more tests can be done for the same level of patient impact.
Any modification to the operating parameters of medical testing equipment requires that SOPs and technical documents be updated to reflect this*. Admitting in court that secret changes were made will likely bring the FDA into play with whole new set of charges and then the medical claims lawyers will pile in as well.
* The underlying principle is that everyone can see how it's done and any issues will be brought to light, patent licencing allows the inventor to gain from widespread adoption of a good thing.
"So if the testing requires less blood wouldn't this be mentioned to the operators, if not then it's just more blood being flushed out at the end of the cycle."
That's what they were going to be selling. Unfortunately for them, it turns out the original machines used more blood for a reason, and their attempts at diluting it made the results unreliable and worthless. They didn't like that, so they lied to pretend it worked anyway.
"Admitting in court that secret changes were made will likely bring the FDA into play with whole new set of charges"
They never got FDA approval. The FDA kept telling them they needed proof, and never got it. More lies were told about that though.
Who do they sue? Theranos? I understand they went defunct in 2018.
Can they sue the directors? Or the CEO? Or someone else from that company? Not sure how that works, but presumably they had insurance which covers legal costs for actions they took while in the company (at least Directors and other senior staff tend to have it, as I understand).
I'm surprised the COTs vendors aren't jumping in here and suing the crap out of her and the rest, I'm *fairly* sure there are legal bits in purchase contracts about modifying the equipment (at least in terms of things like blood testing equipment, c.f. John Deere and all)
Suing for what? After the lawyers get through with this bunch, win or no win, there won't be a penny to claim.
A couple of days ago the WSJ ran a article titled
Prosecutors in Elizabeth Holmes Trial Revealed Untruths, but Did They Prove Intent?
Government’s contention of deception at Theranos will be tested by Ms. Holmes’s testimony: ‘These are hard cases to bring’
I spit the coffee across the room when I saw that.
simple rule of thumb, the more you steal the easier it is to get away with it , or just get a slapped wrist.
comes down to:
1. you have resources avaliable for you to confuse matters enough to get you off
2. the rich fools you conned like to avoid being seen as the fuckwits they are!
Many years ago i worked for Belkin in one of their distribution centres. One lunchtime a guy backed up onto a bay saying that he didn't have his paperwork but he knew he was booked in to pick up a load at this time.
One of the loaders used his initiative and decided the driver must have been there to pick up X load. Half a million pounds worth of products were loaded onto the lorry and the driver was on his way.
It was not too long after that the real guy turned up to pick up his load.
I get this may be hard to believe, and there are obviously more key details that i don't recall or know that enabled such a fuck up to take place. But take place it did.
Anyway, to the point of my tale....those in charge decided not to involve the Police because they did not want the accompanying bad publicity that came with it. Which beggars belief even further really
The reporter who broke the whole Theranos story, John Carreyrou, worked for the WSJ which is owned by Murdoch and was given full reign and editorial support and ended up costing Murdoch a very large sum of money indeed.
He is on record as saying their was no pressure put on him whatsoever
Your honor, I could not possibly believe that I did something wrong in adding the Democrats logos to our Republican manifesto!
Everybody knows that both the Democrats and the Republicans are equally involved in the process of creating laws, so I didn't think there would be any problem including both logos.
Even if they don't agree with our conclusions, the Democrats are involved in the Process, so of course we can use their logo!
Who would confuse it, as them endorsing our manifesto? I totally didn't mean to confuse anyone, honest your honor!
So Theranos took Siemens kit and "modified" it to require a smaller sample... and then patented their mods!!! (I apologize for the excess of exclamation but serious, wtf?)
And kept it secret... because they were worried Siemens would reverse engineer the mods?!
And they thought this was ok?
Imagine the uproar if Huawei had been caught doing something similar (probably don't have to imagine it, remember Tappy...).
The only reason why Siemens' lawyers aren't straining at the leash is because there's no cash left.
No, they didn't patent the mods, this is the difference between a trade secret (where your "only" protection is contractual, but that can still be relatively strong because there is actually some legal protection for them which prevents competitors acquiring them through employees who have broken their non-disclosure for example), and patents, where the details are published and in exchange you get time-limited exclusivity. The downside to a trade secret is you don't have exclusivity if someone else reinvents the same process. From the description Theranos had not patented these modifications, because then trade secret wouldn't apply.
The situation described (modifying the Siemens machines) may not have any come-back for Siemens unless it broke terms in their contract of sale, such as any reverse engineering. Might still have had legal issues about untested medical devices, but I'm not clear on US law in that area, medical devices are generally less regulated than pharmaceuticals. In any case, if prospective investors were required to sign NDAs (which I don't think is uncommon) then they would have still been eligible for trade secret protection (similar situation if you are still applying for a patent, where an NDA means it is not ruled out by being public knowledge).
As I understand it the "modification" was to the sample - diluting them with saline to get the volumes which the machines required from the smaller sample Theranos said they needed for their own device.
This was evil. There was no way the Theranos device could work and Holmes knew it from a very early stage of prototyping. She fired the engineers who also knew and carried out all sorts of scams to hide the facts while soliciting more investments and licensing their blood test service for use on patients who really depended for their lives on the accuracy of their blood tests.
Thanks for the clarification.
One can of course patent an improvement on an existing patent, again I'm not sure whether Siemens could complain about that at all, and even if the filling was confidential the patent if accepted can't be, so they'd find out anyway. If Theranos did patent something based on, for example, reverse engineering that they had a contract saying they must not do, then that'd put them in pretty sticky territory. Could Siemens force them to hand such a patent over? Don't know. Asking investors to agree to non-disclosure might be normal while the patent is still being approved anyway (for example, if planning international patents afterward).
All of which is to say, I find the trade secret line pretty weak. But if they were worried about Siemen's lawyers then filing a patent, whether the filing is confidential or not, would have been pretty stupid as it will be made public on approval, that's the trade-off.
Of course, there remains the possibility no-one involved at that stage actually knew what they were doing. But it seems simpler to ascribe all this to excuses to hide the information from their investors and pretend they had secret technology that actually worked, rather than admit, "We're using standard kit and diluting the samples, yes there's a reason the manufacturers don't suggest that."
Holmes and her legal team must surely be aware they have reached this point. There is nothing left to lose now so why not just answer every allegation or accusation by stretching incredulity as far as they possibly can.
It's so absurd it can't be bullshit.....can it?
I can even see her going down the road of some sort of mental illness copout if all else fails. 'Look at how she answered to her allegations your honour, she is clearly off her tits. She needs help'
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