shutterstock_398767903_tashatuvango
Tashatuvango / Shutterstock.com
17 January 2020AmericasRory O'Neill

Illumina escapes genetics trade secrets claims

A US judge has thrown out a lawsuit accusing US biotechnology companies Illumina and Affymetrix of a “complex, multi-decade concerted effort” to conceal the theft of trade secrets in the 1990s.

Three members of a research team led by geneticist Monib Zirvi filed the suit in August 2018.

They claimed that they only learned about Illumina and Affymetrix’s alleged misconduct during a separate 2015 patent infringement suit filed by Cornell University.

But the judge rejected this narrative, finding that if the researchers had exercised “reasonable diligence”, they would have discovered the alleged misappropriation far earlier than 2015.

In an opinion issued on January 15, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that the statute of limitations, which ranged from three to six years for the plaintiffs’ various claims, had “long since passed”.

According to the original August 2018 complaint, Illumina and Affymetrix, since absorbed into Thermo Fisher Scientific, filed numerous patent applications based on confidential information stolen from a team of researchers in the 1990s.

The research team alleged that Affymetrix CEO Stephen Fodor first obtained the first set of trade secrets from a confidential grant application, in his capacity as a member of the National Institute of Health in 1994.

Affymetrix then filed multiple patent applications claiming discoveries contained in the application, the plaintiffs alleged.

The researchers also claimed that, in 1999, Illumina obtained almost 200 computer files containing details of their discoveries through an employee at PE Biosystems, who unbeknownst to team, were working with Illumina at the time.

Zirvi’s team filed multiple patent applications covering their discoveries, which were subsequently licensed to Cornell University.

Cornell sued Illumina for patent infringement in 2015, which the researchers said led to their discovery of the alleged misconduct. Cornell was not a party in the case dismissed this week.

Did you enjoy reading this story?  Sign up to our free daily newsletters and get stories sent like this straight to your inbox.


More on this story

Americas
7 December 2020   Pharmaceutical companies Illumina and Roche have been sued for allegedly infringing two patents covering the technology for non-invasive DNA testing by Maryland genetic testing company Ravgen.

More on this story

Americas
7 December 2020   Pharmaceutical companies Illumina and Roche have been sued for allegedly infringing two patents covering the technology for non-invasive DNA testing by Maryland genetic testing company Ravgen.