An ex-customer of Theranos, located in Arizona, filed a class-action suit against the biotech company for faulty blood testing conducted at a blood draw location inside Walgreens. The man, initialed only as R.C. is also suing the pharmacy chain.

Lawsuit against Theranos also targets Walgreens.

The former customer filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Arizona. The lawsuit accuses Theranos of deceptive marketing that misled customers from monitoring their health properly. As the lawsuit states, Theranos had touted a “revolutionary new way of drawing blood” using a test “that drew blood with a mere pinprick to the fingertip.”  The lawsuit also targets Walgreens for its association with Theranos. The lawsuit states that the company should have realized the warning signs when the drug store chain had formed a three-year business partnership with Theranos. The lawsuit states that Walgreens “blindly jump[ed]” into a partnership with Theranos without “fully validat[ing] Theranos’s technology” by “promoting the Theranos blood tests and all their big claims without ever even seeing the magical testing device.” Various Walgreens executives had reservations about Theranos technology prior to the formation of the business partnership.

In addition to these civil suits for its faulty technology, Theranos is undergoing federal and criminal investigations. In June, Walgreens ended its partnership with Theranos and shut down the 40 blood draw locations it had set up within the pharmacy chain’s various Arizona locations.

Theranos minimized its use of the Edison device.

Theranos is undergoing a serious investigation for the proprietary Edison machine that the company claimed would be able to diagnose hundreds of diseases by analyzing a single drop of blood. The company had claimed that it’s technology eliminated the need for conventional blood-testing, which requires more blood to be drawn from the patient. However, the company would in many cases use the typical blood draw tests instead. In addition to R.C.’s lawsuit, other lawsuits filed by former customers assert that upon arriving in the clinic, tests did not involve the Edison device. At least nine other former customers are suing the biotech company for its faulty tests.

Former customer experiences heart attack due to faulty lab work.

R.C. states in the lawsuit that he had gone to the Walgreens store to get a blood test after his doctor had required him to have his blood sugar and lipid levels tested for a routine heart check. Because the tests came back erroneously normal, the doctor only recommended that R.C. adhere to his current dietary regimen. When R.C. experienced a heart attack that caused him to be admitted to a hospital less than a month later, R.C. and his cardiologists grew wary about the accuracy of the Theranos lab work. During the hospitalization, doctors implanted two stents into R.C.’s arteries.

R.C. filed his lawsuit when these doubts were verified after Theranos voided thousands of other lab test results from 2014 and 2015. Theranos has claimed that it would comply with the standards that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) had set forth. It has experienced harsh sanctions that prevent its Newark, California lab from operating. Elizabeth Holmes, the CEO and founder of Theranos, has been banned from operating any labs for the next two years.

Class action lawsuit seeks restitution, damages, and costs.

R.C. is seeking class-action status for the lawsuit, in addition to restitutive costs. This amount will be determined during trial. R.C.’s lawsuit clearly demonstrates how Theranos’s faulty technology directly harmed its patients. While operations have stopped in the Newark, California location, the biotech company’s Arizona facility won’t close until sanctions take effect on September 5.

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