Two months ago, Il­lu­mi­na sued Guardant Health’s two co-founders (and ex-Il­lu­mi­na em­ploy­ees), Helmy El­toukhy and Ami­rali Ta­lasaz, al­leg­ing the pair stole trade se­crets, and used Il­lu­mi­na ser­vices and equip­ment to set up the com­pa­ny. At the time, Guardant hit back — claim­ing it was re­tal­i­a­tion.

“Il­lu­mi­na filed a law­suit against Guardant to pro­tect its in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty rights,” an Il­lu­mi­na spokesper­son wrote at the time. “There is no mer­it to Guardant’s claim that the law­suit was filed to sup­press com­pe­ti­tion in the mar­ket.”

Now Guardant Health has filed a mo­tion to dis­miss the case.

Filed on Wednes­day, the mo­tion is be­ing heard in the US Dis­trict Court in Delaware. The 32-page doc­u­ment starts to lay out Guardant’s first ar­gu­ment about the tim­ing of the case and delves head­first in­to its own ar­gu­ments for why the law­suit from Il­lu­mi­na was an act of re­tal­i­a­tion.

Ini­tial­ly, Il­lu­mi­na and Guardant have both been work­ing on de­vel­op­ing liq­uid biop­sy screen­ing tests to po­ten­tial­ly de­tect can­cer ear­li­er. And on this front, the com­pa­nies had been in a part­ner­ship to­geth­er — with Il­lu­mi­na sup­ply­ing se­quenc­ing in­stru­ments to Guardant, up­on which “Guardant’s can­cer de­tec­tion test­ing tech­nol­o­gy is built,” ac­cord­ing to Guardant.

The biotech fur­ther added in its open­ing mo­tion that this sup­ply part­ner­ship had been go­ing on for al­most a decade at this point, and ac­cord­ing to Il­lu­mi­na’s spokesper­son when the law­suit was first filed, the busi­ness re­la­tion­ship will re­main un­in­ter­rupt­ed.

Fast for­ward to 2021, Il­lu­mi­na spent $8 bil­lion to ac­quire Grail, which ac­cord­ing to Guardant is its main com­peti­tor. And while Eu­ro­pean and Amer­i­can reg­u­la­tors ob­ject­ed — with the FTC su­ing to try and stop the deal cit­ing po­ten­tial an­titrust law vi­o­la­tions, ac­cord­ing to the fil­ing — Il­lu­mi­na com­plet­ed the deal. And then it was short­ly a few months af­ter that deal of­fi­cial­ly closed that Il­lu­mi­na filed suit against Guardant. And from Guardant’s view, that tim­ing is an is­sue.

From the fil­ing:

The tim­ing of this law­suit re­veals Il­lu­mi­na’s true mo­tives. Il­lu­mi­na’s law­suit comes short­ly af­ter Guardant co­op­er­at­ed with the FTC in its an­titrust in­ves­ti­ga­tion of the pro­posed Il­lu­mi­na-GRAIL trans­ac­tion, and just two months af­ter two Guardant ex­ec­u­tives pub­licly tes­ti­fied against the trans­ac­tion dur­ing the FTC’s ad­min­is­tra­tive tri­al.

At­tor­neys for the de­fen­dants went on to say that Il­lu­mi­na ad­mits it knew about the al­leged “mis­ap­pro­pri­a­tion of con­fi­den­tial in­for­ma­tion since at least June 2019,” and said that Guardant’s own pub­lic patent ap­pli­ca­tions had been on­go­ing for longer than that. And ac­cord­ing to Guardant, wait­ing un­til re­cent­ly to file the law­suit makes clear that it is re­tal­ia­to­ry.

Fur­ther, the at­tor­neys claim that Il­lu­mi­na’s claims of mis­ap­pro­pri­a­tion are “time-barred” and must be dis­missed since the con­tent that Il­lu­mi­na is su­ing for was is­sued more than three years be­fore the suit was filed.

The FDA’s Oncology Center of Excellence has been a bright spot within the agency in terms of speeding new treatments to patients. That flexibility was on full display this morning as FDA released new draft guidance spelling out exactly how oncology drug developers can fulfill both the accelerated and full approval’s requirements with just a single randomized controlled trial.

While Congress recently passed legislation that will allow FDA to require confirmatory trials to be recruiting and ongoing prior to granting an accelerated approval, the agency is now making clear that the initial trial used to win the AA, if designed appropriately, can also serve as the trial for converting the accelerated approval into a full approval.

A California judge will allow a plaintiff in a state court case to introduce expert testimony connecting a potential carcinogen in former blockbuster medicine Zantac to cancer.

The order was handed down on Thursday from state judge Evelio Grillo, who is now allowing both parties to introduce expert testimony in an upcoming trial after what’s known as a Sargon hearing, where a judge determines the admissibility of expert witnesses and expert opinions.