One of the office complexes of Illumina in San Diego, California, U.S. REUTERS/Mike Blake
(Reuters) - America is on the verge of a revolution in cancer detection that will allow patients to be screened for early-stage disease simply by providing a blood sample. The market for these DNA-based tests could be soon be tens of billions of dollars a year.
A lawsuit in Delaware federal court will help decide who controls a big chunk of that market.
On Wednesday night, the cancer detection pioneer Guardant Health Inc filed a motion to dismiss a patent and trade secrets suit initiated in March by Illumina Inc, a DNA sequencing company that acquired the cancer detection test maker Grail Inc in a $7.1 billion deal last August. From Guardant’s motion, it’s obvious that the Illumina case is no ordinary business dispute.
Illumina’s complaint, filed by Covington & Burling, contends that two Guardant founders who previously worked for Illumina misappropriated critical technology about a decade ago, as they prepared to depart Illumina and establish their new company.
One of the scientists, according to Illumina, downloaded more than 50,000 Illumina documents just before leaving. Dozens of the patents that Guardant later obtained, according to the complaint, incorporate that misappropriated Illumina IP.
Illumina said in the lawsuit that it only learned about the scientists' breach in 2019, when Illumina was a third-party witness in a Guardant patent suit against another Illumina...
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