For those following along with the podcast, Hulu’s The Dropout Episode 4, “Old White Men,” dramatizes events depicted in the podcast’s second episode, “The Enforcer,” during which time Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes brings in Sunny Balwani to help run the company and push for its first major business deal: a partnership with the retail and drug store company Walgreens.
The deal was helped brokered by Dr. Jay Rosan (“Dr. Jay”), a former family-medicine doctor who was then an executive in Walgreens’ health-innovations unit. (Rosan is played by Alan Ruck in the Hulu series.) Reporters Christopher Weaver and John Carreyrou, the latter of whom broke the Theranos story for The Wall Street Journal and would later write Bad Blood, reported on the saga in 2016, when Walgreens severed ties with Theranos. They had invested some $50 million in Theranos.
According to those who worked on the deal, the partnership began in 2010 when Rosan met Holmes at a health-technology conference. (The meeting was apparently random.) Walgreens had built a successful vaccination model in stores and was looking to invest more in the medical lab business. They also created a unit to invest in startups. The talks become more serious in 2011, with Rosan leading the Walgreens charge, according to The Wall Street Journal article.
Rosan arranged Walgreens to pay Johns Hopkins to evaluate their investments. Johns Hopkins would test Theranos’ technology in their labs to ensure it could perform its purported tests. (At the time, Theranos was claiming the device could test for dozens of conditions with only a small sample of blood.)
But Theranos never gave Johns Hopkins the device. Later that summer, Rosan visited Theranos with other Walgreens executives. In a scene very similar to the Hulu series, the Walgreens contingency was closely monitored, with someone even following a Walgreens representative to the bathroom.
Though Walgreens executives were disallowed from seeing the lab, they were reportedly worried Theranos would move forward with a competing drugstore chain if they pressed Theranos too hard for access.
And so without independently verifying Theranos’ claims, Walgreens continued on the path to a deal—to put Theranos technology into Walgreens stores for consumer use. The deal was announced in 2013 and Walgreens opened Theranos testing centers in stores in Arizona and California.
Those tests, however, were rarely done on Theranos machines. Unknown to Walgreens, many of the tests done over the next two years were performed using commercial equipment and not Theranos’ own technology.
By 2015, Theranos wanted Walgreens to expand to more locations, but Walgreens decided not to speed up operations, apparently aware that Theranos was failing to secure Safeway as a partner. (Safeway had doubts about the accuracy of Theranos tests.)
By late 2015, Theranos also began facing increased pressure to prove accuracy after The Wall Street Journal published an investigation questioning the company’s claims.
In June 2016, Walgreens terminated its partnership with Walgreens, after learning Theranos was forced to void all tests on its own machine between 2014 and 2015.
Weaver and Carryrou sum up the Walgreens/Theranos saga: “The relationship is now in tatters, making Walgreens an extreme case study of what can go wrong when an established company that craves growth decides to gamble on an exciting and unproven startup.”
Where is Dr. Jay Rosan now?
At the time of the termination, Rosan was working as a venture capitalist investor. According to his LinkedIn, he also continues to serve as the Senior Vice President of Health Innovation at Take Care Health Systems, a Walgreens company.
This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io
Comments are closed.