Former Theranos Inc. patients will be allowed to testify at the criminal fraud trial of the defunct blood-testing startup’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes, a federal judge ruled Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported. The decision by U.S. District Judge Edward Davila blocked a last-ditch attempt by Ms. Holmes to keep jurors from hearing the stories of patients who say they received inaccurate results from Theranos tests. The ruling comes less than four weeks before the scheduled start of jury selection in the case. Ms. Holmes has pleaded not guilty to counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The patient testimony could be a pivotal piece of the prosecution’s case that Ms. Holmes defrauded investors and patients in her attempt to create a revolutionary company that promised to test for a wide range of health conditions using only a few drops of blood from a finger prick. As the Wall Street Journal first reported in 2015, Theranos’s proprietary technology was unreliable and the company often ran tests on commercial analyzers, including some that it modified to be able to use smaller amounts of blood. Patients on a list of potential witnesses in the court record received Theranos test results that falsely signaled a miscarriage instead of a healthy pregnancy, flagged high levels of a prostate-specific antigen that indicated an aggressive cancer, and claimed patients were HIV positive who weren’t.
