Felt obligated to speak, ex-lab chief says at trial

Theranos problems severe, he testifies

Former Theranos laboratory director Adam Rosendorff felt “obligated from a moral and ethical perspective to alert the public” about the Palo Alto bloodtesting startup’s inaccurate test results, he testified Tuesday at the criminal fraud trial of company founder Elizabeth Holmes.

Rosendorff had for months been struggling in vain to get Theranos management, including Holmes, the chief executive, to address problems with the test results and to implement a legally required process to check the accuracy of the lab equipment and practices, he testified.

“The number and severity of problems had reached a crescendo for me,” Rosendorff told the jury in U.S. District Court in San Jose. Complaints from doctors were frequent, and he felt pressured by managers to defend questionable results, he testified.

He quit in November 2014, after forwarding company emails to his personal account in case of a federal investigation and because he was thinking about filing a whistleblower lawsuit, he said. He talked to a lawyer, then to a Wall Street Journal reporter, he testified. The reporter, John Carreyrou, wrote a series of articles exposing alleged fraud at Theranos.

Holmes is charged with allegedly bilking investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars, and defrauding doctors and patients with false claims that the company’s machines could conduct a full range of tests using just a few drops of blood.

Holmes faces maximum penalties of 20 years in prison and a $2.75 million fine if convicted, plus possible restitution, the Department of Justice has said.