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发帖数: 5258 | 1 Federal prosecutors in Philadelphia said on Wednesday that they had indicted
five people, including two research scientists, on charges of stealing
trade secrets about drugs to treat cancer and other diseases from
GlaxoSmithKline, the British drug giant.
According to prosecutors, the two scientists, Yu Xue and Lucy Xi, worked at
Glaxo’s research facility in Upper Merion, Pa., and emailed and downloaded
confidential data about a dozen or more company products to associates who
planned to sell and market the trade secrets through a company they set up
in China, called Renopharma.
Some of the documents involved a monoclonal antibody, a type of cancer
treatment, that the company was developing. The indictment, unsealed on
Wednesday, describes Ms. Xue, 45, as “one of the top protein biochemists in
the world,” who was the co-leader of the company’s project to develop the
drug.
Federal prosecutors with the Eastern District of Pennsylvania said that to
conceal their crime, Ms. Xue and two other associates, Tao Li and Yan Mei,
agreed to put the proceeds in the name of Ms. Xue’s twin sister, Tian Xue,
who was also charged. Ms. Xi worked with Ms. Xue at Glaxo and was married to
Mr. Mei, prosecutors said.
Lawyers for the defendants declined to comment. Peter Zeidenberg, who
represents Yu Xue, said his client had pleaded not guilty to the charges “
and we will be contesting them vigorously in court.”
Yu Xue was fired earlier this month, a company spokeswoman said. And Ms. Xi
left the company last November.
The indictment quotes emails among some of the people charged in the
indictment, and accuses them of plotting to seek investors in China to
market their own products from stolen research. Prosecutors said the
defendants boasted that their company, based in Nanjing, had received some
financial support and free laboratory space from the government and that its
ultimate goal was to develop its own antibody drugs.
Many of the documents involved a monoclonal antibody that was designed to
link to receptors, known as HER3 receptors, on human cells that are
plentiful in certain types of cancer cells. The product under development
would bind with those receptors and potentially eliminate or slow down the
cancer.
Prosecutors said in the indictment that the documents contained valuable
information that could help researchers discover which antibodies would
successfully “bind” to the target cells, as well as help with a process
known as “humanization,” in which an antibody is transformed so that it
works well in humans after being successfully tested on animals.
Finally, the manufacturing process itself is difficult because the
antibodies must be harvested, purified and then be able to be safely
injected into the body. Much of this information, prosecutors said, “would
be especially useful for a start-up biopharmaceutical company.”
There appeared to be a power struggle among the defendants as they tried to
sort out control of the new company. Tao Li, one of the owners of Renopharma
, was accused of raising money for the company from sources including
private investors and government agencies and universities, according to the
indictment. Mr. Mei, the husband of Ms. Xi, worked in China to market and
sell the information, prosecutors said.
At one point, Ms. Xi exchanged messages with Mr. Mei, complaining that Ms.
Xue had been “annoying” her, but Mr. Mei warned his wife not to lose her
temper. She replied, “I won’t ... she is the queen,” according to the
indictment.
Another time, after Tao Li emailed Mr. Mei news about a researcher in
Wisconsin who was charged with stealing details of a cancer-fighting drug,
Mr. Mei replied, “This sounds scary.” Another case, involving scientists
at Eli Lilly who were accused of stealing trade secrets, prompted Glaxo to
set up a meeting with employees, according to the indictment. And it
prompted Ms. Xue to warn her colleagues not to ship out more Glaxo documents.
In a statement on Wednesday, Glaxo said it had been cooperating with federal
authorities and “we do not believe the breach has had any material impact
” on the company’s business or research and development activity. A
spokeswoman said the company has one such antibody in early stages of
development.
Justin K. Beyer, a partner at Seyfarth Shaw who focuses on trade secrets,
said scientists often possessed valuable information about a drug company’s
business. “There is a lot of information that a company would want to
protect that someone in a scientist role or a business role may have access
to,” he said. “It could give them a jump-start in the marketplace.”
However, he added: “These cases tend to rise and fall on what was being
done to protect the information and does the information truly represent a
trade secret.”
In 2013, after federal prosecutors indicted the two scientists at Eli Lilly,
the case disintegrated and the charges were later dropped. And last fall,
federal prosecutors dropped all charges against another Chinese-American
scientist, Xi Xiaoxing, the chairman of Temple University’s physics
department. He had previously been accused of sharing sensitive American-
made technology with China but it later turned out prosecutors had
misunderstood the science involved in the case. |
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