Disgraced former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes is set to report to a Texas prison Tuesday.
Despite several last-minute appeals in a bid to remain free, Holmes is scheduled to report by 2 p.m. local time and spend nearly a dozen years behind bars on fraud and conspiracy counts related to her tenure at the blood-testing startup.
While Holmes was originally expected to surrender at the end of April, the mother of two was able to push back the start of her sentence by one month.
The prison sentence marks the conclusion of a dramatic legal saga that brought down a tech leader who was expected to upend the healthcare industry, appearing on magazine covers and garnering comparisons to Steve Jobs.
Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford University, with the company’s promise centered on the concept of only needing a miniscule amount of blood to test for a wide range of diseases.
The biotech generated great interest not only among healthcare stakeholders but American statesmen and Silicon Valley investors as well, peaking at a private valuation of more than $4 billion in value.
However, despite a partnership with Walgreens and claims that its tests worked, questions abounded about the quality of the company’s technology. In late 2015, The Wall Street Journal reported that most of the tests claimed by Theranos were performed on a standard blood-testing machine rather than on its ‘Edison’ devices.
Less than three years later, the Department of Justice charged Holmes and COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, with a 12-count indictment (one count was later dropped). The indictment was superseded during the summer of 2020.
Holmes was convicted in January 2022 and sentenced in November of the same year to 11 years and two months in a Texas prison, followed by three years of supervised release. Weeks later, Balwani was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison.
Both cases were overseen by U.S. District Judge Edward Davila. Earlier this month, Davila ordered Holmes to pay $452 million in restitution to the victims of her crimes.
Given her once-prestigious status as a thought leader and subsequent fall from grace, Holmes has been a pop culture fixture in recent years. The Wall Street Journal investigation led to the publication of the best-selling book Bad Blood, which documented the company’s collapse. In 2019, famed documentarian Alex Gibney also directed The Inventor about the Theranos scandal.
Additionally, Holmes was the subject of The Dropout, an eight-part ABC Audio podcast that was then developed into a Hulu miniseries starring Amanda Seyfried, for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award for her performance.
More recently, Holmes was interviewed by The New York Times in a polarizing profile ahead of prison sentence. While the majority of the interview focused on her life since the abrupt end of Theranos, she also commented that Seyfried was “not playing me,” in the miniseries and instead was portraying a “character I created.”
The calamitous case not only captured the interest of the general public but also served as a call to caution among medical marketers, especially when a company or its ideas may seem too good to be true.
After Holmes was sentenced last fall, Amy West, head of U.S. digital transformation and innovation at Novo Nordisk, told MM+M that the situation serves as a “a good [wakeup call] to everybody, whether you’re a big pharma or a healthcare startup.”
