Dive Brief:

• The president of medtech company Arrayit was convicted by a federal jury of participating in a scheme to mislead investors, commit fraud and pay illegal kickbacks linked to $77 million in false claims.
• Mark Schena allegedly sought to defraud Arrayit investors by claiming his technology could test for virtually any disease using only a few drops of blood, the Department of Justice said in a statement. Arrayit initially pitched the technology in allergy testing before pivoting to COVID-19 when the pandemic began.
• Schena’s conviction on nine federal charges carries a maximum sentence of more than 100 years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for early next year.

Dive Insight:

The DOJ brought charges against Schena in 2020, accusing the executive of claiming Arrayit’s “microarray technology” enabled it to test based on a drop of blood 250,000 times smaller than the technology touted by Theranos. At that time, the DOJ linked Schena to $69 million in false claims for COVID-19 and allergy tests.

Late last week, a federal jury convicted Schena in a $77 million testing scheme. The executive allegedly paid kickbacks to marketers to obtain blood samples and “orchestrated a deceptive marketing plan that falsely claimed that the Arrayit test was highly accurate in diagnosing allergies.”

Arrayit billed Medicare more per patient for blood-based allergy testing than any other laboratory in the U.S. Bills to commercial payers went above $10,000 per test, the DOJ said.

When...

Read Full Story: https://www.medtechdive.com/news/federal-jury-convicts-medtech-executive-in-7...