BIOMEDICAL 18 THE SCIENTIST
SCIENCE Cover feature
The story of a US blood test that it was claimed would lead to a healthcare revolution, but ended in a multi-million dollar scheme to defraud investors.
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of dollars and the many patients who had put their faith in the test results had been told they were in fact worthless. After a high-profile trial in San Francisco, Holmes has been found guilty on four counts of fraud and now faces a long prison sentence.
Revolutionise healthcare delivery The rise of Theranos began in 2003 when the 19-year-old Holmes, then studying at the School of Engineering at Stanford University, spent her internship at the Genome Institute of Singapore working with SARS test samples. This experience seeded the idea to develop a test that could find the evidence of a range of
ILLUSTRATION: RUI RICARDO
I
t sounded too good to be true. A blood test that could detect the markers for dozens of different health conditions from the merest pinprick of fluid taken from the tip of a finger. No need for big needles stuck in the arm, no need for multiple samples and no need to wait days for the results, which could be processed accurately in a matter of hours by a single bespoke device. Of course, it was too good to be true. The science underpinning these claims was lacking. But it took more than a decade to uncover the truth about Theranos, the company fronted by Elizabeth Holmes, by which time investors had lost hundreds of millions
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