One copied genetic marker is what unravelled the defence
Justice David Lok ruled on 22 January 2026 that former Diagcor staff misused trade secrets to build a rival prenatal test in under two months.
The case, Diagcor Bioscience Incorporated Limited v Chan Wai Hon Billy and others [2026] HKCFI 488, traces back to the summer of 2012, when a cluster of employees left Diagcor, a Hong Kong biotechnology company, and almost immediately set up a competing laboratory business. Within weeks the new operation launched its own prenatal genetic gender test, the kind of product that had supplied more than 90 percent of Diagcor's income between 2008 and 2012.
The defendants insisted they had developed the test independently. The court did not accept that account. The strongest evidence against the defence was forensic: one genetic marker in the rivals' development files, labelled MK15, was identical to a Diagcor marker called FM01, down to an idiosyncratic two-letter trim that a Diagcor researcher had made to save costs. The judge called the detail a "strong indicium of copying" and found it could not have been coincidental, citing an English authority that an odd feature lifted from the original tends to give copying away.
MK15 never made it into the test sold to the public; it sat in the development files. The court was not persuaded that its absence from the final test disproved copying, treating its presence in the development material as the telling footprint.
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