Just a week after The Wall Street Journal published a critical report about her company’s testing procedures, Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes spoke out against the article at none other than The Journal’s WSJD Live global technology conference.
Kia Kokalitcheva of Fortune had the day’s news:
Elizabeth Holmes, CEO of blood testing startup Theranos, rebutted recent allegations that her company’s technology is far less effective than what’s she’s portrayed publicly.
Last week, Theranos came under fire after a scathing Wall Street Journal report called into question some of the company’s practices. The article alleged that Theranos failed to use its proprietary equipment and finger-pricking technology for all, or even most, of the blood tests it offers to patients. Instead, the report said the company used equipment from other manufacturers and required traditional draws of blood from patients, rather than just a few drops. Sources quoted in the article also questioned the consistency and accuracy of tests done using Theranos technology.
But Holmes, speaking on Wednesday at a technology conference hosted by the Wall Street Journal in Laguna Beach, Calif., denied any deception. She repeatedly accused the Wall Street Journal of misinterpreting information it obtained and relying on unreliable sources and misquoting others.
Above all, Holmes countered the claim that the Food and Drug Administration has raised questions about Theranos technology being an unapproved medical device. She said the equipment received approval in July including its “nanotainer,” a tiny vial that holds the few drops of blood drawn using its finger-prick device.
Katie Benner and Andrew Pollack of The New York Times described the Holmes’ defense of her company:
Ms. Holmes now says she is planning to release a 16-page point-by-point rebuttal of the articles, a document that concludes by accusing the articles’ author of having an agenda that considered Theranos “a target to be taken down.”
The rebuttal even dissects the motivations of various people quoted in the articles.
“We’ll put this out there and let people judge for themselves what the facts are,” Ms. Holmes said on Tuesday in an interview with The New York Times.
Ms. Holmes ventured into the lion’s den on Wednesday, defending her company in an onstage interview here at The Wall Street Journal’s own WSJ.DLive technology conference, where she drew applause for showing up.
“We know the integrity of what we’ve done,” Ms. Holmes said at the conference. She characterized criticisms of her company as “a few people who want to say bad things about us.”
Ms. Holmes has complained that critics are out to get her company because it threatens the traditional lab industry.
But the company, which is highly secretive about its technology, has not announced any new policies in response to the criticism.
Theranos, Ms. Holmes said, had no immediate plans to do what skeptics say would most persuade them: publish data in peer-reviewed medical journals showing that its test results were as accurate as those of more established laboratories.
Eric Newcomer of Bloomberg explained how CEO Holmes lashed out at The Journal:
Holmes attacked the Journal’s anonymous sources, compared the newspaper to a tabloid for quoting the widow of a Theranos founder, and defended her company’s practices across the board. The Journal says it stands by its coverage.
Holmes also challenged a Business Insider article that quoted Google Ventures partner Bill Maris saying his firm had long been skeptical of Theranos’s technology. Holmes said she had never met with Maris and Theranos had waved off investing interest from Google Ventures. A spokeswoman for Google Ventures didn’t respond to a request for comment about Holmes’s remarks.
In response to a question about why Theranos doesn’t submit its research in peer-reviewed research papers, Holmes said she didn’t oppose scholarly review. Instead, she said, the company’s employees were simply too busy.
“If anyone is doing anything, they’re doing FDA submissions, and that’s our full-time job right now,” she said.
John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal wrote about other critics that have spoken out about Theranos’ testing practices:
Ms. Holmes was also asked about an Internet post by former Apple Inc. executive Jean-Louis Gassée over the weekend in which Mr. Gassée described big discrepancies between test results he got from Theranos and results he got from Stanford Hospital. Mr. Gassée told the Journal he emailed Ms. Holmes to ask for an explanation on July 1 and never heard back from her.
“Unfortunately, I personally did not receive this letter. I wish he’d called our call center,” she said. “We absolutely are going to follow up with him now that we’re aware of this.”
Reached by phone Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Gassée said he sent Ms. Holmes an email, not a letter, at info@theranos.com. “For a healthcare company, pretending not to have received a documented email message from a patient with serious health issues is simply unacceptable,” he said, adding that Theranos hasn’t followed up with him about his test results.
Several doctors have told the Journal they had stopped referring patients to Theranos because they didn’t trust its results.
Representatives of Theranos have said that the company’s lab work is accurate, that it is misleading to draw conclusions from “a handful of patient anecdotes” and that the company has performed tests on millions of patients referred by thousands of doctors and has received highly positive feedback.
