jettisoned the patch altogether in favor of something akin to the handheld devices used to monitor blood-glucose levels in diabetes patients. Elizabeth wanted the Theranos device to be portable like those glucose monitors, but she wanted it to measure many more substances in the blood than just sugar, which would make it a lot more complex and therefore bulkier.
The compromise was a cartridge-and-reader system that blended the fields of microfluidics and biochemistry. The patient would prick her finger to draw a small sample of blood and place it in a cartridge that looked like a thick credit card. The cartridge would slot into a bigger machine called a reader. Pumps inside the reader would push the blood through tiny channels in the cartridge and into little wells coated with proteins known as antibodies. On its way to the wells, a filter would separate the blood’s solid elements, its red and white blood cells, from the plasma and let only the plasma through. When the plasma came into contact with the antibodies, a chemical reaction would produce a signal that would be “read” by the reader and translated into a result.
Elizabeth envisioned placing the cartridges and readers in patients’ homes so that they could test their blood regularly. A cellular antenna on the reader would send the test results to the computer of a patient’s doctor by way of a central server. This would allow the doctor to make adjustments to the patient’s medication quickly, rather than waiting for the patient to go get his blood tested at a blood-draw center or during his next office visit.
By late 2005, eighteen months after he’d come on board, Shaunak was beginning to feel like they were making progress. The company had a prototype, dubbed the Theranos 1.0, and had grown to two dozen employees. It also had a business model it hoped would quickly generate revenues: it planned to license its blood-testing technology to pharmaceutical companies to help them catch adverse drug reactions during clinical trials.
Their little enterprise was even beginning to attract some buzz. On Christmas Day, Elizabeth sent employees an email with the subject line “Happy Happy Holidays.” It wished them well and referred them to an interview she had given to the technology magazine Red Herring. The email ended with, “And Heres to ‘the hottest start-up in the valley’!!!”
| TWO |
The Gluebot
Edmond Ku interviewed with Elizabeth Holmes in early 2006 and was instantly captivated by the vision she unspooled before him.
She described a world in which drugs would be minutely tailored to individuals thanks to Theranos’s blood-monitoring technology. To illustrate her point, she cited Celebrex, a painkiller that was under a cloud because it was thought to increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes. There was talk that its maker, Pfizer, would have to pull it from the market. With the Theranos system, Celebrex’s side effects could be eliminated, allowing millions of arthritis sufferers to keep taking the drug to alleviate their aches and pains, she explained. Elizabeth cited the fact that an estimated one hundred thousand Americans died each year from adverse drug reactions. Theranos would eliminate all those deaths, she said. It would quite literally save lives.
Edmond, who went by Ed, felt himself drawn in by the young woman sitting across from him who was staring at him intently without blinking. The mission she was describing was admirable, he thought.
Ed was a quiet engineer who had gained a reputation in the Valley as a fix-it man. Tech startups stymied by a complex engineering problem called him and, more often than not, he found a solution. Born in Hong Kong, he had emigrated to Canada with his family in his early teens and had the habit common among native Chinese speakers who learn English as a second language of always speaking in the present tense.
A member of Theranos’s board had recently approached him about taking over engineering at the startup. If he accepted the job, his task would be to turn the Theranos 1.0 prototype into a viable product the company could commercialize. After hearing Elizabeth’s inspiring pitch, he decided to sign on.
It didn’t take Ed long to realize that Theranos was the toughest engineering challenge he’d ever tackled. His experience was in electronics, not medical devices. And the prototype he’d inherited didn’t really work. It was more like a mock-up of what Elizabeth had in mind. He had to turn the mock-up into a functioning device.
The main difficulty stemmed from Elizabeth’s insistence that they use