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Turns out she has around 200 patents (with other people mostly).
So if her tech didn't work, then why didn't people figure it out sooner? Why did it take a journalist from WSJ to find the fraud?
How come some prominent physicist or biologist doing "competition research" didn't declare that the patents were based on bogus claims?
Patenting a completely ridiculous and impossible idea is quite straightforward if you know the system and have the money and reputation.
Journalists are notoriously bad at technical due diligence, but the fact is even trained scientists and engineers can be duped, particularly when access is limited.
Having been in a similar situation (not the federal one), where something looked fishy in a company I was involved in (and ended up being revealed as fishier than fish), I wouldn't be at all surprised if it comes out that the patents were fine, the ideas were fine, the talent had the skills, and it would have been less work on everybody's part to actually build it than to lie, cheat, and misrepresent it.
I have never been to or interviewed anywhere more paranoid/aggressively secretive than Theranos, and that includes military bases and classified government installations. This should be the moral of the story: investors should take as a red flag companies that work that hard to show you they're hiding their technology.
Furthermore, if she's got patents on these processes, can she wield them against anyone who tries to implement them successfully ?
Whoever ends up liquidating Theranos will be in a position to make a call with licensing and enforcement, assuming, of course, they don't let the patents lapse (which is probably a shorter timeframe than a complicated bankruptcy will take).
Letting the patents lapse is a deliberate strategy sometimes (it's more a defensive rather than offensive approach, to block other actors from blocking you from your own technology).
Furthermore, if she's got patents on these processes, can she wield them against anyone who tries to implement them successfully ?
Separately, it's quite common for people to patent things that don't work or can't be directly implemented as stand-alone things at all. Indeed, defendants in patent litigation often point out the many early patents on "flying machines" as proof that the issuance of a patent is not proof that it would lead to a working thing.
Furthermore, if she's got patents on these processes, can she wield them against anyone who tries to implement them successfully ?
In particular, it seems that the microfluidics stuff needs new inventions to make it work in practice. So presumably those aren't described in the patents. Although it wouldn't be the first time that management overlooked solutions provided by their own researchers.
2) Patents are really hard to read
3) The difference between something that looks plausibly like it might work when written down and something that actually works can be hundreds of millions of dollars of bugfixing.