Elizabeth Holmes, the former star of Silicon Valley, sentenced to 11 years in prison for fraud in the management of her California startup Theranos, has appealed her sentence, writes AFP.

Last month, Holmes was sentenced to just over 11 years in prison for fraud in the management of her startup Theranos, a company that promised to revolutionize blood tests, AFP reported.

The defendant, who is pregnant, must serve her term until April 27, said Judge Edward Davila, who presided over the trial of the entrepreneur, who was found guilty in January of lying to investors about his company’s real progress.

In late January, Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty of 4 counts of conspiracy, fraud and defrauding investors, but was acquitted of the patient fraud charges. Two of those allegations involved patients who received false blood test results.

The Therano scandal is more exciting than a Hollywood movie. The charismatic boss cheated investors, shareholders and patients, and the machines that were supposed to forever change the way diseases were detected failed at all.

Theranos scandal – Elizabeth Holmes, in short:

• Theranos claimed that it had developed technology that could run tests starting from a few drops of blood taken from a simple finger prick, and that more than 150 conditions could be detected from those drops. The idea was that people could quickly and easily find out if they had a disease, and detect it while it was still in its infancy.
• Elizabeth Holmes is a Theranos “superstar.” She founded the company at the age of 19 in 2003, and in 2007 Theranos was valued at $1 billion. In 2014, she was valued at nine billion dollars, but she could not fulfill what she promised.
• Theranos’ public downfall began in October 2015 with several investigations published by the Wall Street Journal that exposed a series of lies and fraud against investors, shareholders and patients. Theranos closed in 2018, and the trial of the company’s chairman began on September 8, 2021.
• Holmes has been accused of lying to investors about how many tests and what tests the company’s machines could perform, and there have been numerous instances of false test results. In addition, patients were used as “guinea pigs” for testing devices that were not approved and were highly inaccurate.
• Theranos received a total of $945 million in funding over the years from prominent investors whom Holmes managed to dupe in a variety of ways, including creating a board of directors made up of prominent military, political and diplomatic figures.
• In recent days, Holmes testified in the highly publicized trial and defended herself, saying that everything she did was in good faith and that she was confident Theranos would deliver on its promises. On Nov. 29, she said her ex-boyfriend , who was also an important director of the company, abused her and always wanted to control her life.
• And investors have a lot of fault in the whole story because they didn’t study the company deeply and many invested in Theranos just because they saw other people with money bet on the company. Testimony during the trial shows that many investors were “swept up” by the exaggerated hype surrounding Theranos and did not stop to analyze whether these promised blood superanalyzers could actually be developed.
• And the press promoted Theranos a lot and wrote about Holmes in very laudatory terms, comparing her not only with Steve Jobs, but also with Elon Musk or even Albert Einstein! But the press played a crucial role in exposing the massive hoax through multiple investigations that exposed every big lie.
• What happened shows that in health care it can be very difficult for new companies to succeed because they have to make NO promises, be transparent, get absolutely all approvals and stay grounded even when the funding is coming together and everything seems to be going well, happy new year

Read the analysis: Theranos – How the biggest scam in the history of Silicon Valley became possible