Who is Tyler Shultz? The whistleblower who led to the toppling of Elizabeth Holmes’ $9 billion Theranos touted to become the ‘Apple of healthcare’

Tyler Shultz, who went on to be one of the whistleblowers to expose bio-technology firm, Theranos, met the firm’s founder Elizabeth Holmes while studying at Stanford university. The two met through his grandfather George Schultz, who was on the company’s board at the time and the Secretary of State.

According to Tyler’s own website, he was 22 at the time and eager to join Theranos. He joined the firm as an intern in 2013 and later was employed full-time at the company, then touted to be the ‘Apple of healthcare’. Tyler worked on the company’s infamous Edison device as a research engineer. Both Holmes and Tyler were reportedly friends while he worked at her company.

Describing his internship at the company, Tyler in an interview noted that during his time as an intern at the company, he saw very few red flags as he had good mentors and enjoyed his research.


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What was Theranos and the scandal surrounding it?

The bio-technology company was founded by Elizabeth Holmes in 2003, after she dropped out of the chemical engineering program at Stanford University aged 19. According to Holmes, the startup’s name is a combination of the words ‘therapy’ and ‘diagnosis’.

The startup flourished between 2003 and 2014 with Holmes securing funding from investors and building a lab and working on the company’s technology in secret. In 2011 Holmes met Tyler’s grandfather, who backed her startup completely and provided her access to funding.

Holmes’ company was assured a $10 million loan from Pakistani businessman Ramesh ‘Sunny’ Balwani, who went on to join the firm in 2009. He went on to become the company’s president and chief operating officer. He and Holmes also shared a long-term relationship with each other.

After announcing the startup in 2013, Theranos launched its first product the following year in 2014. This was a lab test process which the company claimed could run over 1,000 tests using only a single drop of a person’s blood. Theranos launched the ‘Edison’ device for blood analysis and the ‘nanotainer’ for blood collection for the process.

The company claimed its process could revolutionise the healthcare industry as a blood test generally uses about 5 to 10 ml of blood of each test required to be conducted. The company was even granted an FDA approval for its Herpes test.

Elizabeth Holmes was named one of the richest women in America by Forbes in 2014. It was also reported that she owned a 50% stake in Theranos making her worth $4.5 billion. The company went on to raise $1 billion in funding and valued at nearly $9 billion.

In 2015, The Wall Street Journal revealed that the company had been using traditional blood testing machines instead of the infamous Edison device. They used the device for only 240 of the tests.

Sunny Balwani then stepped down from the company in 2016 and Theranos voided its last two years of blood tests conducted using its devices. After multiple lawsuits, layoffs and inspections at Theranos, both Holmes and Balwani were charged with fraud. They were later indicted after pleading not guilty in 2018 and the company was dissolved.

Tyler went on to expose Theranos as a fraud

Theranos was exposed in 2015, after the Wall Street Journal published a series of reports with multiple whistleblowers and Tyler was one of them. Tyler said that he only got to work on a Theranos device for the first time after being employed full-time.

In an interview earlier, Tyler said he still remembers the exact moment he realized that the Silicon Valley startup was a fraud. He and his team had been concerned about the validity of the technology which was supposed to revolutionize blood tests. Out of this concern, his team decided to test themselves for syphilis. The tests alarmingly came out to be positive for 20% of the team. Tyler said he and his team just laughed over the inaccurate tests. He added, “I felt physically sick…like I had been punched in the stomach,” when the company went on to validate the technology, claiming it was effective.

Over the next eight months Tyler along with several other colleagues discovered several malpractices in the company’s technology. These included data manipulation, false positives and even falsification of blood samples. In later interviews, Tyler said that the fact that the company’s technology did not work was an “open secret” in Theranos.

Tyler voiced his concerns about the technology on April 11, 2014 but the exchange did not result in anything. He also faced backlash from the company’s president Sunny Balwani and subsequently resigned.

After leaving the company, Tyler went on to become an informant, along with former colleague, Erika Cheung, not only for the publication but also for several federal agencies helping indict both Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani. Although he was anonymous, both the publication and his family knew he was the whistleblower.

Tyler also founded Flux Biosciences and has worked at several bio technology companies. He was named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 for Healthcare in 2017 as a 26 years old.