Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes leaves after a hearing at a federal court in San Jose, Calif., on July 17, 2019. [Image courtesy of Reuters/Stephen Lam]
One of Theranos’ whistleblowers testified on the inaccuracies in the blood analyzers that Theranos had touted to investors on the third day of Elizabeth Holmes’ federal fraud trial.
Erika Cheung, a former Theranos lab associate, testified yesterday that the machines the company was using to conduct patient blood tests had inaccuracies of quality control test results that would result in inaccurate patient tests, Silicon Valley News reports. She said that some 30% of prostate cancer tests were inaccurate and thyroid tests returned with a failure rate of more than 50%.
Cheung claimed that Theranos would throw out outlier data points to get the tests to pass quality control checks, The Washington Post reports. She said choosing those outliers was like “cherry-picking” and that the lab had no rules about which data points to choose. Cheung testified that Theranos was also running tests on third-party machines in an upstairs lab known as the “Dinosaur Lab” and was using commercially available Hepatitis C testing kits.