Theranos Trade Secret

While Walgreens is exposed to all the general ethical conundrums of the business world, the highly regulated “Pharmacies and Drug Stores” industry does not give much room for them to act unethically.

She thought "probably the most devastating part of this is that [she] thought [they] did," (Holmes). But the idea didn’t work out, they didn’t have enough time to be ready for Walgreen’s rollout. It became clear that Theranos never used the miniLab for patient testing. Since 2014 Theranos has been struck with many allegations that their tests are inaccurate. They are being investigated by many agencies. In many of the interviews she did, she stated that they were actually making these devices that worked. Theranos was a gigantic fraud; this doesn’t mean that they committed fraud. You can lie to the journalists and newspapers all you want, people do it all the time. if you fool them it becomes their problem. When you use those lies to get money from investors then it turns into fraud. From what I have read the investors were just as bamboozled as the

They have also attacked patent listings in the Food and Drug Administration “Orange Book” and have alleged monopolization through fraud on the Patent and Trademark Office and sham litigation. Yet other cases have condemned distribution agreements as unlawful exclusive dealing. These government actions have led to substantial private class action litigation against the pharmaceutical industry. The FTC has also challenged numerous mergers and acquisitions in the industry over the last decade. One common feature in all of these cases is the need to define a relevant market. In nonmerger cases, the FTC and private plaintiffsgenerally allege narrow markets, limited to a single drug and its generic equivalent in some cases and to generic drugs excluding the bioequivalent “brand-name” drug in other cases. In its merger challenges, on the other hand, the FTC has alleged markets ranging from those based upon a particular chemical compound, to broader markets based upon various drugs’ manner of interaction or dosage form, to still broader markets of all drugs used to treat a disease or condition. In numerous pharmaceutical merger challenges, the government has included in the market not only currently marketed drugs but also other drugs under development, alleging “innovation markets.”

I think Big Pharma companies skew their data very regularly. Although this is not ethical, it's practiced in this field because there is a certain probability calculated as it relates to side effects and ineffectiveness. For instance when we take Tylenol as a child we eventually become tolerant to the dosage. As we get older we need to increase the dosage even more than is advertised to get relief. The Pharma companies do not advertise that ALL pills have a toxicity level and will affect our organs at some point in time. Each pill is tested for toxicity levels before being released to the public. With that said, these companies take on a certain amount of acceptable risk when producing medication. The public has accepted this risk with

I can protect it through employment secrecy agreement between myself and my assistant Igor. A trade secret is a plan, process, formula, or any other valuable information not patented but which gives its possessor a competitive trade advantage as long as it is kept secret .While the benefits of strong patent protection for 17 years seemed appealing, the down-side is that the secret recipe would be publicly disclosed and would be free for anyone to duplicate once the patent expires. While a patent protection might have been sufficient for a typical product of average market life span, I think Frankenstein is no ordinary/ average product. Therefore I want to give it the longest lasting protection available - protection that simply is not affordable by a patent. Moreover, there’s no substantive difference between patents and trade secrets.

The pharmacy Holmes worked at was owned by Elizabeth S. Holton and her husband Mr. Holton (Holmes). When Holmes had been working for few months Mr. Holton went missing and was believed to be dead. H.H Holmes acquired the pharmacy from Mrs. Holton and then eventually she also went missing and was believed to be dead as well (Holmes). Holmes is believed to have been part of the death and disappearance of Mr. and Mrs. Holton. Once Mrs. Holton disappeared he owned the pharmacy and then soon started construction on his “Murder

Although Holmes’ actions spooked many of the people close to his crimes as well as many who had heard of them, possibly the most unsettling things about Holmes was

He had two children, one son and one daughter. He went out of sight for six years after abandoning Clara and his son. He would always somehow come up with some con as to where he was and what he was doing during the time of his victims' deaths. The police had always questioned him, but had never really pinned anything on him. No one wanted to believe that Holmes was an evil master mind. He was so handsome and charismatic. His tall stature and piercing blue eyes made women often swoon at the sight of him. He could also talk anyone into anything at the sound of his voice and the medical, knowledgeable jargon he used. He even got an old lady to give him her husbands pharmacy after his death sometime after he arrived to Chicago. Other sources said that he killed her and inherited the pharmacy without anyone knowing what happened. Either way the old woman should have been happy that such a noble man was running her pharmacy. He was always the perfect assistant, making sure that her money was going towards helping the company in any way. He would even meet up with venders, creating a stable environment for her and her dying husband. He eventually killed her but when others would ask he stated that she had moved to California, but had no forwarding address (Taylor, Troy).

The Phlebotomist is the person that is trained to draw blood from a patient for clinical or medical testing and in this case, a complete blood panel.

HealthSouth Corporation was one of the largest publicly traded owners of rehabilitative hospitals within the Untied States and paved the way for its industry. However, prior to 2003 the company had a very dark secret: fraud. In 2003 HealthSouth was accused of making $2.7 billion in false journal entries in the company’s system (Helios, 2013). These false entries allowed the corporation to inflate its earnings and revenue. While the corporation was dabbling in a fraudulent, aggressive account system, auditors were unable to detect the extent of the fraud occurring. If not for Michael Vines and Weston Smith, HealthSouth Corporation might have continued its false entries and continued deceiving shareholders and even Wall Street itself. HealthSouth serves as a historical example of how corporate culture can use fraud and deception schemes to not only rationalize what it is doing, which is an element of the fraud triangle, but also encourage fraudulent financial statements.

Sometimes compared to her hero Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes is well known as one of the most successful and youngest female entrepreneurs in America. The company she is building and the work she is revolutionizing is fascinating. Her company, Theranos, is developing a hardware, called a nanotainer that can carry out the exact same blood tests as diagnostic-labs do, and actually in a much faster time of just a few minutes, with only a pinprick of blood instead of three to four tubes of blood. By doing so, she will be able to eliminate one major cause of avoiding blood tests requested by doctors for the 40-60% of patients in America- the fear of big needles.

The Pharmaceutical industry has been in the spotlight for decades due to the fact that they have a reputation for being unethical in its marketing strategies. In The Washington Post Shannon Brownlee (2008) states, “We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow.” This honorable statement is completely lost in today’s world of pharmaceutical marketing tactics. These tactics are often deceptive and biased. Big Pharma consistently forgets their moral purpose and focuses primarily on the almighty dollar. Big Pharma is working on restoring their reputation by reforming their ethical code of conduct.

For example, Vedula (2012) notes that FDA guidelines state pharmaceutical companies can use peer-reviewed articles to publicize evidence of a drug’s effectiveness for off-label uses, as long as a number of conditions are met—perhaps the most essential of which is that “the information disseminated must not be false or misleading.” However, Vedula continues, there is no unyielding regulation that all research findings have to be published. Therefore, a company can still choose to selectively disseminate favorable findings. His article concludes that there is now a copious amount of evidence that suggests selective reporting of study results, based on the strength and direction of findings, is performed extensively by the pharmaceutical industry.

All researchers were paid by either BI or Eli Lilly for either consulting or data monitoring

NeoMed Technologies developed a diagnostic device used for cardiac testing, and is headquartered in Ohio. They developed a CAD screen system to detect coronary artery disease. The company was founded in 2000 and is based in Cleveland, Ohio.