Elizabeth Holmes, one of Silicon Valley's most infamous entrepreneurs, is set to stand trial on Aug. 31 on charges of defrauding investors and patients of the blood-testing startup, Theranos.
The 37-year-old Theranos founder and chief executive officer -- once proclaimed the youngest female self-made billionaire -- faces multiple counts of conspiracy and wire fraud in relation to the collapse of the blood-testing company.
The selection of the panel of jurors is set to start Aug. 31, and opening statements are set Sept. 8 in a San Jose, California federal court.
The court proceeding has been more than three years in the making, with Holmes originally charged in June 2018. Her trial has been delayed several times by the birth of Holmes' child on July 10 of this year and the coronavirus pandemic.
At trial, a central question will be whether Holmes and her ex-romantic partner and co-defendant, former Theranos president and chief operating officer Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, used the company to deliberately defraud investors into bankrolling the startup and intentionally dupe patients into undergoing untrustworthy blood tests.
In 2003, Holmes dropped out of Stanford University at 19 years old to found Theranos with the objective of revolutionizing the healthcare industry.
Her remarkable rise collapsed in 2018 when a Wall Street Journal investigation exposed the company's technology did not work.
The Journal revealed that only a small amount of tests was carried out using the startup's diagnostics equipment, and that multiple tests were made on other companies' machines, using diluted blood samples.
Essentially, Holmes is accused of lying to investors and patients about how Theranos' blood testing worked and how effective the tests were.
Between 2013 and 2015, Theranos secured more than $700 million from private investors. At one point, Theranos was valued at more than $9 billion.
Though Holmes dismissed the claims made by the Journal's original reporting were accurate, she has never told in-depth her side of the story from that point on.
In an interview with CNBC's Mad Money in 2015, Holmes said it's what happens "when you work to change things... first they think you are crazy, then they fight you, and then all of the sudden you change the world."
Holmes was said to have pursued a book deal to get her side of the story made public. The book never materialized.
If convicted of the charges, Holmes could face up to 20 years in prison.
