by Jessica Xiao, AsAmNews Contributor
Whistleblowers Erika Cheung and Tyler Shultz shared the challenges of speaking out about Theranos’s faulty Edison device in a fireside chat at the 2022 AACC (American Association for Clinical Chemistry) Annual Scientific Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo in Chicago on Tuesday, July 26. It is the same conference at which Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes shared her faulty patient diagnostics device years earlier. The session was moderated by AACC President Dr. Stephen Master.
Theranos, at its height, was valued at 10 billion dollars and raised more than 700 million USD from investors. Holmes promised that its Edison Machine would be able to diagnose everything from cancer to cholesterol levels using a single drop of blood. Shultz and Cheung saw internally that the machine was unable to live up to its promise and became sources to a Wall Street Journal investigative series that exposed Theranos’s fraudulent practices, leading to the eventual criminal conviction of Elizabeth Holmes and COO Sunny Balwani.
Cheung, now the co-founder of nonprofit Ethics in Entrepreneurship and Hong Kong venture capitalist, was just 22 years old when she joined Theranos as a Lab Associate in Research and Development working on the “Edison Device.” She learned about the company at a UC Berkeley career fair. Shultz, now CEO Flux Biosciences, joined Theranos in 2013 as a research engineer on the assay validation team, which checked the accuracy of the...
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