Elizabeth Holmes

Elizabeth Holmes
Elizabeth Holmes backstage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2014
Born	Elizabeth Anne Holmes (1984-02-03) February 3, 1984 Washington, D.C., US
Residence	Palo Alto, California, US
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Stanford University (dropped out)
Occupation	Health technology entrepreneur
Net worth	US$3.6 billion (January 2016)
Title	Founder & CEO, Theranos
Parent(s)	Christian Holmes IV Noel Anne Daoust
Website	theranos.com

Elizabeth Anne Holmes (born February 3, 1984) is an American businesswoman and the CEO of Theranos, a privately held blood test company she founded in 2003 that is currently under federal criminal investigation.

Early life and education

Holmes was born in February 1984 in Washington, D.C. Her father, Christian Rasmus Holmes IV, worked in the United States, Africa, and China as part of government agencies such as USAID. Her mother, Noel Anne (Dauost), worked as a Congressional committee staffer. She has a brother, Christian Holmes V, who is the director of product management at Theranos. Her great-great-great-grandfather, Charles Louis Fleischmann, was a founder of the Fleischmann's Yeast company.

Her parents’ work in disaster relief encouraged Holmes to pursue science and service early on. When she was nine years old, Holmes wrote in a letter to her father saying, “What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn’t know was possible to do.” When Holmes was 9, her family moved to Houston and then China, where she claims to have started a business selling C++ compilers to Chinese universities.

As a child, she read the biography of her great-great-grandfather Christian R. Holmes, who was a surgeon, engineer, inventor, and a decorated World War I veteran. He was born in Denmark in 1857 and was the dean of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine,. The career of her ancestor inspired Elizabeth to take up medicine, but she soon found that she had a fear of needles. She later described this fear as one of her motivations to launch Theranos.

After graduating from St. John's School in Houston in 2002, Holmes enrolled at Stanford University to study chemical engineering, but she left Stanford prior to completing her undergraduate degree.

Theranos

Main article: Theranos

Holmes established Real-Time Cures in Palo Alto before she changed the company's name to Theranos (an amalgam of "therapy" and "diagnosis").

Theranos claimed to have developed a blood-testing device named Edison that uses a few drops of blood obtained via a finger-stick rather than vials of blood obtained via traditional venipuncture, utilizing microfluidics technology. Its founders have raised over $700 million from investors, valuing the company at $9 billion, without their testing device ever being subject to peer-reviewed study.

As of 2014, Holmes had 18 US patents and 66 non-US patents in her name. She is also listed as a co-inventor on over 100 patent applications.

Controversy over technology

In October 2015, an investigative report in the Wall Street Journal stated that Theranos had probably exaggerated the reach and reliability of its technology, a claim denied by Holmes. Several clinical pathologists and other medical experts also expressed skepticism about Theranos's technology. A week later, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) stated that the company's miniature blood containers were unapproved for any test other than the herpes test. Subsequently, Theranos was ordered to limit the use of its proprietary technology to only one of the 200 tests offered by the company. It was also revealed that the Arizona Department of Health Services had found major issues in the company's other laboratory.

After Theranos's test results came under scrutiny following the Journal's revelations, Holmes said the company had publicly verified its results against those of other providers. After no evidence could be found to support the claim, Holmes agreed on October 27, 2015 to release data showing Theranos's tests were reliable and accurate. No such data was released.

On December 2, 2015, The Washington Post revealed that an attempt to secure a partnership with the US military had led to issues being found with the Edison device and a request that the FDA investigate. Emails obtained by The Washington Post showed Holmes appealing to retired Marine General and former head of Central Command James Mattis to intervene in the investigation on the company's behalf. Mattis would join the Theranos Board of Directors a year later.

Although Theranos was valued at $9 billion by some of its investors, which would have valued Holmes's stake at $4.6 billion, The Economist noted that startups of this nature can wind up being valued as a "fantasy" rather than based upon present reality.

On January 25, 2016, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services sent a stern letter to Theranos following an onsite survey of the company’s Newark, California laboratory, conducted in November 2015. “[I]t was determined that the deficient practices of the laboratory pose immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety,” the letter noted.

CMS gave Theranos a deadline of 10 business days to prove that the laboratory was complying with hematology-related and other lab requirements. Three days later, Walgreens, which had partnered with Theranos to provide its blood testing services in stores, ceased all testing at a Palo Alto, California location, and ordered the company to process all of its other tests from Walgreens locations at its Arizona laboratory instead of the Newark, California lab.

On April 13, 2016, it was reported that CMS regulators were seeking to ban Holmes for two years from owning or operating a blood lab.

Personal life

Holmes ranked number 110 on the Forbes 400 in 2014, and topped the list of America's Self-Made Women in 2015 with a net worth of $4.7 billion.

Awards

Holmes was named the 2015 Success magazine Achiever of the Year. Holmes was a finalist for the 2015 European Inventor Award. Holmes was named a Glamour magazine woman of the year in 2015. In 2015, she also accepted the Under 30 Doers Award at the Forbes magazine Under 30 Summit. In 2015, Holmes was the youngest-ever winner of the Horation Alger Award.

External links

• Theranos
• TEDMED – Talk Details – Lab testing reinvented. Retrieved March 22, 2015.
• Elizabeth Holmes Video produced by Makers: Women Who Make America
• Appearances on C-SPAN