Elizabeth Holmes denies deception at her criminal trial
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — Biotechnology entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes, a former billionaire accused of engineering a massive medical scam, expressed some remorse while on the witness stand Tuesday, but denied trying to conceal that her company's blood-testing methods weren't working as she had promised.
In her third day of testimony during the high-profile criminal trial, Holmes acknowledged making some mistakes as CEO of Theranos, a company she founded in 2003 when she was just 19. But she repeatedly emphasized that she made most of her decisions with the help of other executives and a respected board that included former cabinet members in various presidential administrations.
Holmes, now 37, also made it clear that she never stopped believing that Theranos would revolutionize health care with a technology that was supposed to be able to detect a wide range of diseases and other problems by testing just a few drops of blood.
“It is never smooth," she testified. “There's always challenges."
Theranos eventually collapsed after a series of explosive articles i n The Wall Street Journal and an audit by federal regulators exposed serious and potentially dangerous flaws in the company's blood tests. The scandal wiped out Holmes' fortune, which was estimated at $4.5 billion in 2014 when she was the subject of a glowing cover story on Fortune magazine.
Holmes denied that she intended to deceive anyone about the workings of its partnership with Walgreens, which aimed to install Theranos testing devices in 3,000 of the drugstore chain's stores. Walgreens terminated that partnership after issues with inaccurate test results and the discovery that Theranos was testing many of its samples on conventional diagnostic equipment -- and not with Theranos’ Edison device, which was supposed to provide quicker and less expensive...
