What Chelsea didn’t know at the time was that one of their
pharmaceutical partners had already walked away from the startup.
Earlier that year, Pfizer had informed Theranos that it was ending
their collaboration because it was underwhelmed by the results of the
Tennessee validation study. Elizabeth had tried to put the best spin
she could on the fifteen-month study in a twenty-six-page report she’d
sent to the New York pharmaceutical giant, but the report had
betrayed too many glaring inconsistencies. The study had failed to
show any clear link between drops in the patients’ protein levels and
the administration of the antitumor drugs. And the report had copped
to some of the same snafus Chelsea was now witnessing in Belgium,
such as mechanical failures and wireless transmission errors. It had
blamed the latter on “dense foliage, metal roofs, and poor signal
quality due to remote location.”
Two of the Tennessee patients had called the Theranos offices in
Palo Alto to complain that the readers wouldn’t start because of
temperature issues. “The solution,” according to the report, had been
to ask the patients to move the readers “away from A/C units and
possible air currents.” One patient had put the device in his RV and
the other in a “very hot room” and the temperature extremes had
“affected the readers’ ability to maintain desired temperature,” the
report said.
The report was never shared with Chelsea. She didn’t even know of
the Pfizer study’s existence.
—
WHEN SHE RETURNED to Palo Alto from her three-week stay in
Antwerp, Chelsea discovered that Elizabeth and Sunny’s attention had
shifted from Europe to another part of the globe: Mexico. A swine flu
epidemic had been raging there since the spring and Elizabeth thought
it offered a great opportunity to showcase the Edison.
The person who had planted that germ in her mind was Seth
Michelson, Theranos’s chief scientific officer. Seth was a math whiz
who’d once worked in the flight simulator lab at NASA. His specialty