Pfizer ordered to disclose FBI communications in trade secrets case
A federal judge has ordered Pfizer to hand over its communications with the FBI in a trade secrets case it brought against the founders of Regor Therapeutics last year.
Pfizer filed suit last February against two former employees, Xiayang Qiu and Min Zhong, who quit their Big Pharma jobs in 2018 to launch the Eli Lilly-partnered startup Regor. About five months after leaving Pfizer, Qiu and Zhong applied for patents on a set of compounds that plaintiffs allege “appear strikingly similar to . . . compounds that Pfizer had developed,” according to court documents.
Pfizer accused the defendants of scheming to start a rival company while working on its GLP-1 program and stealing trade secrets. The company claimed to have recovered evidence in its forensic analysis that Zhong downloaded a number of confidential documents in his final months at Pfizer, including information on the company’s GLP-1 technology, and purportedly saved them in an external hard drive before deleting them, according to a complaint.
“The Pfizer trade secrets and confidential information that Qiu and Zhong stole essentially gave Defendants the playbook and the critical underlying science and data to develop their own supposed diabetes-and-obesity treatment, an unlawful head start that saved Defendants significant money and years of development time,” the complaint states.
Regor later denied the claims and questioned why Pfizer waited as long as it did after Qiu and Zhong left Pfizer to bring the suit to court.
Before filing suit, Pfizer launched its own investigation into Qiu and Zhong’s company-issued laptops and email accounts and eventually turned to the FBI, which had previously encouraged companies to share information on suspected cases of trade secret theft.
However, when defendants requested to see 35 emails and text messages between Pfizer and the FBI, Pfizer claimed that the correspondence was “protected from discovery by the work product doctrine, and that thirty-one of the thirty-five were protected by the attorney-client privilege as well.”
Defendants argued that it waived any protections it did have by “relying on and citing its forensic investigation and related findings” in its argument and by voluntarily sharing the documents with the FBI.
Connecticut federal judge Thomas Farrish sided with defendants on Friday, ruling that Pfizer must produce all 35 documents by Feb. 17.
“With respect to Pfizer’s attorney-client privilege claims, the Court concludes that even if the information in the thirty-one e-mails and text messages had once been protected, Pfizer waived that protection by disclosing it to the FBI,” the decision states.
Pfizer said in a statement to Endpoints News on Tuesday that it’s disappointed in the court’s order “as we believe the materials at issue are protected by privilege.”
“This is a discovery dispute and not a ruling on the merits of the case. The company remains confident in its case and believes the full evidentiary record will prove that its trade secrets were misappropriated by the defendants,” the company continued in an email.
Regor has not responded to a request to comment as of press time.
Eli Lilly inked a collaboration and licensing deal with Regor back in 2021 around metabolic disorders, giving the Chinese biotech an upfront payment of up to $50 million and up to $1.5 billion in milestones.
Qiu and Zhong are still listed as Regor’s CEO and COO on the company’s website. Last April, the company announced the launch of a Phase II trial in the US for its GLP-1 receptor agonist in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus.
