What Beam says a former scientist took to a rival, and what it wants back

In Short. A gene-editing company is suing a former scientist, a Chinese company, its chief executive and a U.S. startup. It says the scientist carried secret lab knowledge to a rival that is now testing a drug for the same inherited disease. The companies dispute it, and no court has decided anything.

A COMPANY THAT EDITS GENES has gone to federal court to say a former scientist carried valuable lab secrets to a rival. That is an allegation in a lawsuit. The defendants who have spoken dispute it, and no court has ruled.

First, a definition. A trade secret is valuable information that a business keeps confidential, such as a formula or a method. Unlike a patent, which a government publishes for anyone to read, a trade secret is protected only while it stays secret. U.S. law, including the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act, covers it when the owner took reasonable steps to keep it secret and someone then took or used it improperly.

The dispute concerns an inherited illness, alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, or AATD. Genes hold instructions for making proteins, written in DNA letters. In AATD, one wrong letter in one gene makes a liver protein fold badly. The faulty protein builds up in the liver, and too little reaches the lungs, which it normally helps protect. Gene editing tries to correct that letter inside a patient's own cells. One method, base editing, swaps a single letter, and the editor is carried into liver cells in tiny fatty particles.

The company suing is Beam Therapeutics of Cambridge, Mass. On Sept. 25 it filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts against four defendants. Zi Jun (Emma) Wang is a former Beam scientist. Yuxuan (Jensen) Wu is chief executive of YolTech Therapeutics, a Shanghai company, which is also a defendant. The fourth is Serapha Bio, a U.S. company that licensed YolTech's AATD drug for use outside China. The complaint describes Wang as Serapha's interim chief technology officer.

Beam alleges that Wang worked in its group on delivering gene editors into cells from March 2021 to Jan. 31, 2022. The complaint says that in August 2021, while still at Beam, she retrieved and reviewed "dozens of Beam records she had never opened before, across technical areas well beyond her own, including at night and on weekends." Beam says, on information and belief (a legal phrase for what a party believes but has not shown), that she helped found YolTech in July 2021 while employed by Beam.

The complaint says that five months after Wang left, YolTech filed a Chinese patent application naming her as sole inventor. It says the application describes about 60 lipids, the fatty molecules in those particles, and that roughly half share a structural feature with a lipid Beam was using. Beam argues that a biologist (Wu) and a formulation scientist (Wang) could not have designed, made and tested that much in five months.

The defendants who have spoken dispute this. Shiva Fritsche, Serapha's chief corporate affairs officer, told BioPharma Dive by email on Sept. 29 that "Serapha categorically refutes Beam's claims and will vigorously defend the company." Wu, himself a defendant, told STAT that YolTech "has built its gene-editing technologies through its own research and development efforts and remains confident in the strength of its science and intellectual property." Wang's own position was not found.

Beam asks the court to order the defendants to stop using its information and to hand over the Chinese patent application. It asks that profits and rights to future milestone and royalty payments be held in trust for Beam. It seeks damages in an amount to be set at trial, which the complaint does not state, and up to triple damages under a Massachusetts unfair-competition law.

Both companies are testing drugs. Beam said on Sept. 8 that 38 patients had been dosed with its drug, BEAM-302, as of Aug. 17, and that dosing had begun in a larger group meant to support a possible accelerated U.S. approval. YolTech said on Sept. 7 that four patients had received its drug, YOLT-202, in an investigator-led trial in China (NCT07193615). Those results are company-reported, and no peer-reviewed paper was found. On March 13, YolTech said U.S. regulators had cleared a larger, later-stage (Phase 2/3) study. Beam's complaint says both drugs target the same single-letter change, in a gene called SERPINA1.

A public copy of the court docket, last updated Sept. 29 and read Sept. 30, listed the complaint, notices of appearance, a case assignment and summonses. It showed no answer, though the copy can lag. This is a filed complaint and nothing more. To win, Beam would have to show the information was secret, valuable because it was secret, and used improperly. Until a court rules, it is a claim to weigh, not a finding.