AGENDA 21 RADIO

BY CHRISS STREET

The revolutionary blood-testing company Theranos founded by a Stanford coed and promoted to a $10 billion Silicon Valley valuation will liquidate after being exposed in an epic Silicon Valley scandal.

The Wall Street Journal reported on September 5 that Palo Alto-based Theranos Inc. will liquate its assets under an assignment of benefits to creditors. The company’s CEO Elizabeth Holmes and its former President Ramesh Balwani were both indicted in March by the Securities and Exchange Commission for perpetuating a massive fraud.

Theranos’ fashionable CEO Elizabeth Holmes founded the company as a college freshman in 2003 on claims that with a single pin-prick drop of blood her compact test kit could provide Real Time Cures analysis for 120 different tests and existentially disrupt the blood-test industry that BCC Research estimated was $50 billion in 2015.

Through 10 rounds of funding from top Silicon Valley venture capitalists and an investment by Walgreens, she raised $1.48 billion on a valuation of up to $10 billion, according to the crunchbase.org website that tracts tech venture-backed companies.

Theranos received Food and Drug Administration approval in July 2015 for to test blood for herpes simplex virus (HSV-1) using the Theranos “platform,” which consists of hardware, software and blood-drawing equipment. Analysts believed the evidence submitted by Theranos must have been overwhelmingly compelling, because the FDA granted a “CLIA waiver” that allowed the blood test to be administered by non-laboratory personnel and trained workers outside of a clinical lab.

Breitbart News reported a big boost to the company’s credibility came from attracting a very high profile Board of Directors including former Secretary of State George Shultz; Chairman of Bechtel Group Riley P. Bechtel; former Wells Fargo Chairman and CEO Richard Kovacevich; former Senators Sam Nunn and Bill Frist; former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; and former Secretary of Defense William Perry.

Despite receiving overwhelming adulation from former President Bill Clinton for creating one of the most revolutionary cost savers in healthcare, Wall Street Journal investigative reporter John Carreyrou exposed Theranos for making false claims about the risk profile of its’ proprietary blood test.

Following the media storm, the FDA questioned Theranos statements about the risk profile of its blood test and found 14 “problem observations” regarding the company’s testing lab.

Breitbart reported that two days before Halloween in 2015 with Theranos preparing a multi-billion dollar IPO, the company told Fortune Magazine that its board of directors had shrunk from 12 members to 5 due to negative publicity.

The FDA examiners found that Theranos medical labs had been issued 972 separate “483 Form” problem observations over the 12 months ending September 2014. The FDA considers multiple “problem observations” issued to a single med-tech lab as a potential sign of a pattern of non-compliance.

Breitbart reported that the scandal forced Holmes to resign from President Barack Obama’s ‘Presidential Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship’ in August 2016 and cancel hosting a Silicon Valley fund raiser for Hillary Clinton for President.

Eventually, Theranos admitted it had no effective proprietary technology and had thrown out all of the patient blood tests conducted on its Edison in-house equipment during 2014 and 2015.