Sci­en­tist-CEO ac­cused of im­prop­er­ly us­ing con­fi­den­tial in­fo from uni­corn Alec­tor

The ex­ec­u­tive team at Alec­tor $ALEC has a bone to pick with sci­en­tif­ic co-founder Asa Abe­liovich. Their lat­est quar­ter­ly run­down has this brief note buried in­side:

On June 18, 2019, we ini­ti­at­ed a con­fi­den­tial ar­bi­tra­tion pro­ceed­ing against Dr. Asa Abe­liovich, our for­mer con­sult­ing co-founder, re­lat­ed to al­leged breach­es of his con­sult­ing agree­ment and the im­prop­er use of our con­fi­den­tial in­for­ma­tion that he learned dur­ing the course of ren­der­ing ser­vices to us as our con­sult­ing Chief Sci­en­tif­ic Of­fi­cer/Chief In­no­va­tion Of­fi­cer. We are in the ear­ly stage of this ar­bi­tra­tion pro­ceed­ing and are un­able to as­sess or pro­vide any as­sur­ances re­gard­ing its pos­si­ble out­come.

There’s no ex­plic­it word in the fil­ing on what kind of con­fi­den­tial in­fo was in­volved, but the pro­ceed­ing got start­ed 2 days ahead of Abe­liovich’s IPO.

Abe­liovich, for­mer­ly a tenured as­so­ciate pro­fes­sor at Co­lum­bia, is a top sci­en­tist in the field of neu­rode­gen­er­a­tion, which is where Alec­tor is tar­get­ed. More re­cent­ly, he’s al­so helped start up Pre­vail Ther­a­peu­tics as the CEO, which raised $125 mil­lion in an IPO. And there he’s plan­ning on work­ing on new gene ther­a­pies that tar­get ge­net­i­cal­ly de­fined sub­pop­u­la­tions of Parkin­son’s dis­ease. Fol­lowup pro­grams tar­get Gauch­er dis­ease, fron­totem­po­ral de­men­tia and synu­cle­inopathies.

But this time Abe­liovich is the CEO rather than a found­ing sci­en­tist. And some of their pipeline over­laps with Alec­tor’s.

Abe­liovich and Pre­vail, though, aren’t tak­ing this one ly­ing down.

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