to lie in front of the fireplace while he worked.
Fuisz came upon the startup’s website. The home page gave a
cursory description of the microfluidic system Theranos was
developing. Under the website’s News tab, he also found a link to a
radio interview Elizabeth had given to NPR’s “BioTech Nation”
segment a few months earlier, in May 2005. In the interview, she’d
described her blood-testing system in more detail and explained the
use she foresaw for it: at-home monitoring of adverse reactions to
drugs.
Fuisz listened to the NPR interview several times while gazing out
the window at the koi pond in his yard and decided there was some
merit to Elizabeth’s vision. But as a trained physician, he also spotted
a potential weakness he could exploit. If patients were going to test
their blood at home with the Theranos device to monitor how they
were tolerating the drugs they were taking, there needed to be a built-
in mechanism that would alert their doctors when the results came
back abnormal.
He saw a chance to patent that missing element, figuring there was
money to be made down the road, whether from Theranos or someone
else. His thirty-five years of experience patenting medical inventions
told him such a patent might eventually command up to $4 million for
an exclusive license.
At 7:30 on the evening of Friday, September 23, 2005, Fuisz sent an
email to his longtime patent attorney, Alan Schiavelli of the law firm
Antonelli, Terry, Stout & Kraus, with the subject line “Blood Analysis—
deviation from norm (individualized)”:
Al, Joe and I would like to patent the following application.
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