Dicerna escalates war with Alnylam over RNAi secrets, claiming its rival wants a monopoly
Alnylam made quite a splash in early 2014 when it announced that it had acquired Merck’s RNAi subsidiary Sirna for $175 million. The deal to acquire Merck’s group, which the pharma giant had bagged in a $1.1 billion buyout in 2006, included some valuable delivery tech that Alnylam thought would benefit its GalNAc platform.
But there was a fly in that ointment that would drive Alnylam $ALNY to sue RNAi rival Dicerna $DRNA 18 months later in state court for allegedly misappropriating trade secrets that dealt with that GalNAc tech. According to Alnylam, Dicerna had improperly swept up tech Alnylam paid for when it hired a group of scientists ousted from Merck after the pharma giant had decided to shut it all down and offload the work. After a long series of legal moves, that case is supposed to move forward to a trial in the spring of 2018.
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