Theranos CEO Can't Catch a Break

CEO Elizabeth Holmes has stepped down as an entrepreneurial ambassador for the Obama administration.

Chris Newmarker

When will things ever get better for Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes? Her company acknowledged Wednesday that she was stepping down as an ambassador for the U.S. Commerce Department's Presidential Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship (PAGE) initiative. The program includes such luminaries as AOL co-founder Steve Case.

Theranos said in a statement: "Elizabeth Holmes is proud to have had the opportunity to serve on PAGE, contributing to the development of the next generation of female entrepreneurs. She is stepping down from the program to spend all her time focused on one thing, and that is Theranos and its needs, especially as the company focuses on sharing its technologies with the scientific community."

Only a year before, Vice President Joe Biden had visited Theranos' Newark, CA lab, with the company touting blood testing technology that only required fingerprick's worth of blood. "Talk about being insipired! This is inspiration, man," Biden quipped at the time. 

Only months later, in October, a Wall Street Journal exposé called into question the accuracy of Theranos' tests. And it only got worse from there. Recently, the Newark lab was shut down amid concerns from regulators. The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services sanctions still followed up with proposed sanctions that would ban Holmes from the lab testing business for two years. 

Walgreens in June announced it was severing ties and booting the struggling blood-testing company out of 40 of its Arizona drugstores. Meanwhile, Theranos is facing a sting of federal class-action lawsuits, and the company is reportedly under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and the SEC.  

Holmes tried to turn the corner with a Monday appearance at the American Association for Clinical Chemistry annual meeting in Philadelphia. She released data about the company's testing platform. But she also garnered some criticism because she focused on the company's desktop robotic blood testing system, with less information about the finger stick blood collection technology. 

"Holmes spoke for more than forty-five minutes about an entirely new product, a novel device still in need of regulatory clearance and more tests. It was an attempt to shift the focus from the past to the future. But the strange disconnect between expectations and reality left the scientists and experts who were watching with more questions than they started with," Sheelah Kolhatkar wrote in The New Yorker. 

Chris Newmarker is senior editor of Qmed. Follow him on Twitter at @newmarker.

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