San Diego cou­ple charged with steal­ing trade se­crets, open­ing Chi­nese biotech as DOJ crack­down con­tin­ues

A San Diego cou­ple has been charged with steal­ing trade se­crets from a US hos­pi­tal and open­ing a busi­ness based off those se­crets in Chi­na as the con­tro­ver­sial in­dus­try-wide crack­down on al­leged cor­po­rate es­pi­onage con­tin­ues. On the same day, the De­part­ment of Jus­tice an­nounced they had ar­rest­ed Bei­jing rep­re­sen­ta­tive Zhongsan Liu for al­leged­ly try­ing to ob­tain re­search visas for gov­ern­ment re­cruiters.

Li Chen, 46, and her hus­band Yu Zhou, 49, were ac­cused by fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors of con­spir­ing to, at­tempt­ing and suc­cess­ful­ly steal­ing se­crets re­lat­ed to ex­o­some re­search from Na­tion­wide Chil­dren’s Hos­pi­tal in Colum­bus, Ohio, where they worked for 10 years.

Liu, head of the Chi­na As­so­ci­a­tion for In­ter­na­tion­al Ex­change of Per­son­nel (CAIEP-NY), is ac­cused of con­spir­ing to ob­tain re­search schol­ar visas for per­sons whose pur­pose was to re­cruit US ex­perts to Chi­na.

The charges fol­low a string of in­ves­ti­ga­tions, pros­e­cu­tions and fir­ings across the biotech and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal in­dus­try over the past two years. US of­fi­cials and some US phar­ma ex­ec­u­tives have ar­gued the charges have been war­rant­ed and nec­es­sary, with FBI As­sis­tant Di­rec­tor William F. Sweeney Jr call­ing Liu’s pur­port­ed ac­tions part of a broad­er trend.

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