Theranos felon Elizabeth Holmes advising baby-daddy on new blood-testing startup from behind bars: report

Disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is throwing her support behind a new medical startup — despite currently serving a federal prison term stemming from her previous biotech venture, according to a report.Holmes, 41, is locked up at a federal prison in Bryan, Texas after being convicted in 2022 and sentenced to more than 11 years for defrauding investors in her now-infamous blood-testing startup, Theranos.Her current partner, Billy Evans, with whom she has two children, has now raised “millions of dollars” for a new startup that sounds eerily similar to what Theranos was involved in, and he’s been getting advice from her as it gears up to launch, two anonymous sources close to the matter told NPR.The company — called Haemanthus, Greek for “blood flower” — focuses on medical testing, utilizing technology that enables AI sensors to perform medical tests using beams of light, according to the outlet and a January patent the company secured.Its patent says the tech can be used to test “biological material” including sweat, saliva and urine, and purports to be able to perform diagnostic tests using small amounts of blood.Haemanthus’ core technology, known as Raman spectroscopy, has been shown to be capable of diagnosing conditions like ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and certain forms of cancer, the outlet writes.It has also been used to find improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on war battlefields.Before her conviction, Holmes was hailed as a Silicon Valley wunderkind for her work on Theranos — which she touted as being able to perform hundreds of medical tests with just a few drops of blood, a far cry from traditional methods which require larger samples.Her net worth soared to around $4.5 billion at the height of her fame, with Theranos forging lucrative partnerships with large companies including Safeway and Walgreens.

But the bottom dropped out in 2015 when a pair of whistleblowers came forward and exposed fraudulent practices and inaccu...