How Arizona Republicans Also Fell Head-Over-Heels for Theranos's Elizabeth Holmes

How Arizona Republicans Also Fell Head-Over-Heels for Theranos's Elizabeth Holmes September 13, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff

PALO ALTO, Calif. – If one thing has been made abundantly clear about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, she has a gift when it comes to selling her vision to those outside of the life sciences community.

Holmes was able to woo significant numbers of Silicon Valley investors and supporters to her side, inflating the worth of her startup blood-testing company to an estimated $9 billion at its peak. That was of course before intense scrutiny was leveled at Theranos’s blood-testing claims and greatly devalued that $9 billion estimation. But her fame was there as the Silicon Valley crowd applauded her as a revolutionary figure who could disrupt the healthcare industry.

But there’s been another group that Holmes has endeared herself to in many ways–the political class. Until recently, Holmes counted a number of Washington, D.C. insiders as her advisors, including former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissenger, and former U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz. She also cultivated former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry and U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn.

It was through her skills at dealing with elected officials that Holmes was able to expand her testing sites in Arizona through a contract with Walgreens. A Vanity Affair article published Monday highlights the full-court press Holmes delivered to Arizona’s Republican leadership, touting her testing sites as “free-market” solutions to drive healthcare prices down and allow patients to have their blood tested without a doctor’s consent. The bill passed overwhelmingly in Arizona, with only the state’s medical association standing in opposition. Passage of the bill allowed Theranos to open its 40 Walgreens locations–sites that were shut down earlier this year after the company underwent intense scrutiny over the efficacy of its testing, as well as the company being forced to invalidate two-year’s worth of testing data that impacted thousands of patients. Vanity Fair notes that the bill passed without any of the Republican leadership asking about how well the Theranos technology worked–something that even Walgreens failed to do when it struck its deal with Theranos.

It is unlikely that Holmes will be able to so convincingly sway support in business and political circles in the near future without being required to demonstrate more transparency as well as show a product that works as promised. Holmes has attempted to pivot from blood-testing, something that was forced after the U.S. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services banned her for two years from owning or operating a blood-testing facility due to the problems with her laboratory in California that was at the root of the invalidating of data. In the beginning of August, Holmes unveiled the company’s new portable laboratory system, dubbed Edison, which is expected to be able to run a multitude of diagnostic tests. That system though has already run afoul of regulatory agents due to a Zika virus test the lab is supposed to perform. It wasn’t the lab itself that was the issue, but how the samples were collected. Inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration discovered Theranos had “collected some data supporting the accuracy of the Zika test without implementing a patient-safety protocol approved by an institutional review board.”

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