https://news.yahoo.com/bit-uncomfortable-criminal-allegations-awards-132050894.html

It is a bit uncomfortable’: Before the criminal allegations, an awards program honored Insys and Theranos

When it comes to having a bad corporate reputation, it doesn’t get much worse than Insys Therapeutics and Theranos.

Last week, five former Insys executives, including founder John Kapoor, were found guilty of racketeering in pushing the company’s powerful opioid; jurors said they were horrified when they saw a music video, produced to pump up sales, featuring two Insys salesmen rapping about ramping up the dose of the painkiller. Meanwhile, ex-Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes and her former No. 2 Sunny Balwani are facing criminal charges for defrauding investors, patients, and physicians about their blood-testing technology; they’re expected to go to trial, perhaps next year.

All of which makes it a little awkward, in retrospect, that an Arizona trade group honored Insys (in 2014) and Theranos (in 2015) as the “Arizona Bioscience Company of the YeaR

It is a bit uncomfortable to have them on the list,” acknowledged Joan Koerber-Walker, president and CEO of the Arizona BioIndustry Association, or AZBio for short, which runs the annual awards program.

But AZBio’s board of directors has no plans to rescind the honor to either of its scandal-ridden awardees, though the question has been discussed. That’s because so many of these companies’ Arizona-based employees did, in fact, do the work they were recognized for — and haven’t been accused of wrongdoing, Koerber-Walker said.

Read more: Fentanyl executive John Kapoor’s conviction is good news for holding corporations accountable

After all, researchers and executives at Arizona-based Insys did successfully develop the fentanyl spray Subsys and earn approval in 2012 from the Food and Drug Administration to market it to treat severe cancer pain. (It was around then that the criminal activity began: Lawsuits, journalists, and the just-concluded court trial have documented Insys’s strategy, carried out between 2012 and 2015, of targeting and bribing physicians.)

And Theranos, based in Silicon Valley before it was dissolved late last summer, picked Arizona as the main testing ground for its blood-testing technology. Arizona-based Theranos employees did, after all, successfully open up several dozen “wellness centers” inside Walgreens stores in Arizona over a matter of months starting in 2013. (That success gave many Arizona patients flawed medical results that in some cases impacted their care. Theranos ultimately agreed to pay $4.6 million to Arizona patients who paid for its blood tests, as part of a settlement secured by Arizona’s attorney general; more than 76,000 refund checks were ultimately mailed out.)

The award in question seeks to honor “the for-profit bioscience company whose Arizona-based operations did the most to transform the world during the last 12 months,” according to the criteria AZBio maps out on its website. Happily for AZBio, the more recent winners have been basically controversy free. A local news organization, the Phoenix New Times, last year was first to report that Insys and Theranos are past winners.

AZBio has no plans to revamp the way its award winners are chosen, Koerber-Walker said. The process starts when AZBio asks the community to nominate deserving companies; about six to 10 come in each year. Next comes a voting process in which volunteer judges who work in the local life sciences industry (but don’t have direct conflicts of interest) rank the nominated companies according to their own views of who is most deserving. The votes are tallied, and the winning company is asked to accept their award — and verify that the information about it submitted as part of the nomination is accurate.

“Now, you could say: Well, did you go back and independently research all of these companies to see if what the company said was true? We don’t have the resources to do something like that,” Koerber-Walker said.

As Koerber-Walker sees it, there are two key questions at play in thinking about Insys’ and Theranos’ inclusion on a list of winners: “Is it appropriate to look at these companies through the lens of history — and rewrite it? And did they do what they purported to do at the time that they were awarded?”

Koerber-Walker feels comfortable with how AZBio has come down on those questions. She’s also glad that the award centers around Arizona-based operations.

“Now if they had won a business ethics award? We might be having a different conversation,” Koerber-Walker said with a laugh.