hunck
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Elizabeth Holmes: Theranos founder convicted of fraud
Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has been convicted of defrauding investors after a months-long landmark trial in California.Prosecutors said Holmes knowingly lied about technology she said could detect diseases with a few drops of blood.
Theranos, at one point valued at $9bn (£6.5bn), was once the darling of biotech and Silicon Valley.
The firm promised it would revolutionise the healthcare industry with a test that could detect conditions such as cancer and diabetes with only a few drops of blood.
But these claims began to unravel in 2015 after a Wall Street Journal investigation reported that its core blood-testing technology did not work.
For nearly four months at trial, the jury of eight men and four women were presented with two starkly different accounts of the former self-made billionaire, whose downfall shook Silicon Valley.
Her company secretly relied on commercially available machines to run the tests, prosecutors said.
At trial, multiple lab directors testified to telling Holmes about the flaws in Theranos' technology but being instructed to downplay their concerns. At the same time, they added , Holmes told investors the technology was operating as planned.
Holmes "chose fraud over business failure. She chose to be dishonest with investors and patients", said prosecutor Jeff Schenk in closing arguments. "That choice was not only callous, it was criminal."