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16 January 2020Big PharmaEdward Pearcey

Former Genentech employee cuts plea deal with FBI in trade secrets case

A former Genentech employee has pleaded guilty to a reduced charge after offering "superseding information" to the FBI as part of an ongoing trade secrets investigation.

James Quach was one of four former employees at the Roche subsidiary charged with stealing and then sharing Genentech’s oncology treatment trade secrets with JHL Biotech, a biologics manufacturer based in Taiwan.

Quach used access to computer systems to download hundreds of confidential manufacturing protocols and procedures from Genentech’s secure document repository system, it was claimed during the initial court filing in 2018.

Quach was originally charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud and faced several years in jail. However, in a ruling delivered at the US District Court for the Northern District of California last Friday, 10 January, he accepted a lesser charge of intentionally accessing a computer without authorisation.

Quach, along with former principal scientist Xanthe Lam and two other people, was charged in late October with working with a JHL staff member to acquire proprietary information on several blockbuster drugs.

In September 2019, Genentech and JHL reached an agreement which required the Taiwanese company to destroy all cell materials related to the cancer drug brands involved, with JHL also agreeing to pay Genentech’s fees and costs.

The original 2018 court filing claimed that “documentary evidence, including emails, text messages, Skype logs, audit records, and other documents—as well as admissions from two of the named defendants—all make clear that former Genentech employees and others at JHL conspired to give JHL an illegal and corrupt advantage in the biotechnology industry by stealing Genentech’s trade secrets and other confidential and proprietary information relating to Genentech’s medicines and manufacturing processes.”

Genentech merged with Roche in 2009 and is based at Roche’s San Francisco campus.

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9 July 2020   Amid confusion over patent eligibility, US life sciences IP owners should consider trade secret law when building their IP protection strategy, argues John A Stone of DeCotiis, FitzPatrick, Cole & Giblin.
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