Mark Alden Schena (born May 21, 1963) is an American biochemist and president of a public life sciences health care company.
[4] Mark Schena, and his company ArrayIt, were charged with securities fraud by the U.S. Justice Department for promoting an unproven technology to detect coronavirus in clinical samples.
[5] Schena has written four books on microarrays,[6]: page [7][8][9] including the first textbook on the subject,[10] and has been featured by journalists in interviews covered by the print media, radio and television.
[14] In 2001, Schena was featured on the Nova television documentary "Cracking the Code of Life", a two-hour special hosted by ABC News Nightline correspondent Robert Krulwich.
Schena used his position as president of Arrayit Corp. to bribe doctors and recruiters into making false claims regarding a test his company was purportedly developing for COVID-19.
U.S. Attorney David L. Anderson of the Northern District of California was quoted as saying “The scheme described in the complaint, in which the defendant allegedly leveraged this allure by appending the fear of the COVID-19 pandemic, amounts to a cynical multimillion-dollar hoax.”[19] On September 1, 2022, Schena was convicted of nine federal charges, including conspiracy to commit wire and health care fraud and three counts of securities fraud.