the one black-and-white reader Theranos had left with them after the
Project Beta kickoff party. He was dying to tear the strips of security
tape off its case and crack it open. Theranos had sent them some test
kits for it, but they were for obscure blood tests like a “flu
susceptibility” panel that no other lab he knew of offered. It was
therefore impossible to compare their results to anything. How
convenient, Hunter had noted. Moreover, the kits were expired.
Van den Hooff said no. In addition to signing confidentiality
agreements, they’d been sternly warned not to tamper with the reader.
The contract the companies had signed stated that Walgreens agreed
“not to disassemble or otherwise reverse engineer the Devices or any
component thereof.”
Trying to contain his frustration, Hunter made one last request.
Theranos always invoked two things as proof that its technology had
been vetted. The first was the clinical trial work it did for
pharmaceutical companies. Documents it gave Walgreens stated that
the Theranos system had been “comprehensively validated over the
last seven years by ten of the largest fifteen pharma companies.” The
second was a review of its technology Dr. J had supposedly
commissioned from Johns Hopkins University’s medical school.
Hunter had placed calls to pharmaceutical companies and hadn’t
been able to get anyone on the phone to confirm what Theranos was
claiming, though that was hardly proof of anything. He now asked Van
den Hooff to show him the Johns Hopkins review. After some
hesitation, Van den Hooff reluctantly handed him a two-page
document.
When Hunter was done reading it, he almost laughed. It was a letter
dated April 27, 2010, summarizing a meeting Elizabeth and Sunny had
had with Dr. J and five university representatives on the Hopkins
campus in Baltimore. It stated that they had shown the Hopkins team
“proprietary data on test performance” and that Hopkins had deemed
the technology “novel and sound.” But it also made clear that the
university had conducted no independent verification of its own. In
fact, the letter included a disclaimer at the bottom of the second page:
“The materials provided in no way signify an endorsement by Johns