began to suspect that Elizabeth was downplaying to the board the
breadth of Sunny’s role.
There was also the murky question of what she told the board about
their relationship. When Elizabeth informed Tony that Sunny was
joining the company, Tony asked her point-blank whether they were
still a couple. She responded that the relationship was over. Going
forward, it was strictly business, she said. But that would prove not to
be true.
—
CHELSEA’S CENTOCOR ASSIGNMENT took her to Antwerp, Belgium, in
the fall of 2009. Daniel Young, a brainy bioengineering Ph.D. from
MIT, accompanied her there. Daniel had been hired six months earlier
to help add a new dimension to the Theranos blood-testing system:
predictive modeling. When Elizabeth pitched pharmaceutical
executives now, she told them that Theranos could forecast how
patients would react to the drugs they were taking. Patients’ test
results would be input into a proprietary computer program the
company had developed. As more results got fed into the program, its
ability to predict how markers in the blood were likely to change
during treatment would become better and better, she said.
It sounded cutting-edge, but there was a catch: the blood-test results
had to be reliable for the computer program’s predictions to have any
value, and Chelsea started to have her doubts about that soon after she
arrived in Belgium. Theranos was supposed to help Centocor assess
how patients were responding to an asthma drug by measuring a
biomarker in their blood called allergen-specific immunoglobulin E, or
IgE, but the Theranos devices seemed very buggy to Chelsea. There
were frequent mechanical failures. The cartridges either wouldn’t slot
into the readers properly or something inside the readers would
malfunction. Even when the devices didn’t break down, it could be a
challenge coaxing any kind of output from them.
Sunny always blamed the wireless connection, and he was right in
some instances. The process by which test results were generated