It is a know [sic] art to check variou [sic] blood parameters like blood glucose, electrolytes, platelet activity, hematocrit etc. What we would like to cover as an improvement is the presence of a memory chip or other such storage device which could be programmed by a computer or similar device and contain the “normal parameters” for the individual patient. Thus if results would differ significantly from these norms—a notice would be given the user or health professional to repeat the sampling. If the significant difference persists on the retest, the device using existing technology well known in the art, to contact the physician, care center. [sic] pharma company or other or all.
Please let me know next week if you could cover this. Thx. Rcf
Schiavelli was busy with other matters and didn’t respond for several months. Fuisz finally got his attention on January 11, 2006, when he sent him another email saying he wanted to make a modification to his original idea: the alert mechanism would now be “a bar code or a radio tag label” on the package insert of the drug the patient was taking. A chip in the blood-testing device would scan the bar code and program the device to automatically send an alert to the patient’s doctor if and when the patient’s blood showed side effects from the drug.
Fuisz and Schiavelli exchanged more emails refining the concept, culminating in a fourteen-page patent application they filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on April 24, 2006. The proposed patent didn’t purport to invent groundbreaking new technology. Rather, it combined existing ones—wireless data transmission, computer chips, and bar codes—into a physician alert mechanism that could be embedded in at-home blood-testing devices made by other companies. It made no secret of which particular company it was targeting: it mentioned Theranos by name in the fourth paragraph and quoted from its website.
Patent applications don’t become public until eighteen months after they’re filed, so neither Elizabeth nor her parents were initially aware of what Fuisz had done. Lorraine Fuisz and Noel Holmes continued to see each other regularly. The Holmeses settled into a new apartment they purchased on Wisconsin Avenue near the Naval Observatory. Lorraine drove over from McLean on several occasions and accompanied Noel, clad in her jogging suit, on walks through the neighborhood.
One day, Noel came over to the Fuisz home for lunch. Richard joined them out on the house’s big stone patio and the conversation drifted to Elizabeth. She had just been profiled in Inc. magazine alongside several other young entrepreneurs, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. The press her daughter was beginning to garner was a source of great pride to Noel.
As they nibbled on a meal Lorraine had picked up from a McLean gourmet shop, Fuisz suggested to Noel in a syrupy singsong voice he employed when he turned on the charm that he could be of assistance to Elizabeth. It was easy for a small company like Theranos to be taken advantage of by bigger ones, he noted. He didn’t reveal his patent filing, but the comments may have been enough to put the Holmeses on alert. From that point on, interactions between the two couples became fraught.
The Fuiszes and Holmeses met twice for dinner in the waning months of 2006. One dinner was at Sushiko, a Japanese restaurant down the road from Chris and Noel’s new apartment. Chris didn’t eat much that evening. While visiting Elizabeth in Palo Alto, complications from a recent surgery had forced him to make a detour to Stanford Hospital. Fortunately, Elizabeth’s boyfriend, Sunny, had arranged for him to stay in the hospital’s VIP suite and covered the bill, he told the Fuiszes.
The conversation turned to Theranos, which had completed its second round of funding earlier in the year. Chris mentioned that the fund-raising had attracted some of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley, which was a good thing, he added, because he and Noel had put the $30,000 they’d saved for Elizabeth’s Stanford tuition into the company.
The dinner then apparently grew testy for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. Richard and Chris had never gotten along and Richard may have said something that got under the other man’s skin. Whatever the case, according to Lorraine, Chris Holmes criticized the Chanel necklace she was wearing and later, after they’d settled the bill and wandered out onto Wisconsin Avenue, made what seemed like a veiled threat by bringing up the fact that John Fuisz, another one of Fuisz’s sons from his first