A Swiss crim­i­nal court is keep­ing Chi­nese sci­en­tist Gong­da Xue in jail for now as US of­fi­cials look to ex­tra­dite him for his role in a fam­i­ly en­ter­prise that stole more than a half bil­lion dol­lars in drug se­crets and trans­ferred them to Chi­na.

Lo­cal news sources in Switzer­land re­port that the crim­i­nal court re­ject­ed the sci­en­tist’s ap­peal, say­ing that a po­ten­tial 20-year prison sen­tence makes him a clear flight risk.

The US has been af­ter Gong­da Xue for his al­leged in­volve­ment in a crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy with his sis­ter, Yu “Joyce” Xue, a GSK sci­en­tist in Up­per Meri­on, PA, who pled guilty to one count of trans­fer­ring the phar­ma gi­ant’s trade se­crets to a com­pa­ny they had cre­at­ed called Renophar­ma in Nan­jing. That biotech was sub­si­dized by the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment.

Ac­cord­ing to US charges, Yu Xue stole se­crets and trans­ferred them to her broth­er in Switzer­land, where he did work on them at the Friedrich Mi­esch­er In­sti­tute. Reuters con­firmed with the in­sti­tute that he had been a post-doc there. From there the se­crets went to Chi­na, where they were mar­ket­ed by an al­leged ac­com­plice.

Yu Xue’s guilty plea last sum­mer came with the caveat that she nev­er be­lieved she was steal­ing ac­tu­al se­crets, say­ing that the in­for­ma­tion on patents was all pub­licly avail­able.

The FBI ar­rest­ed an­oth­er Chi­nese sci­en­tist, Tao Li, in 2016 and found “a num­ber of GSK doc­u­ments con­tain­ing trade se­cret and con­fi­den­tial in­for­ma­tion” on his com­put­er re­gard­ing prod­ucts un­der de­vel­op­ment, re­search da­ta as well as re­search, man­u­fac­tur­ing and de­vel­op­ment process­es. He al­so pled guilty to one charge.

The con­spir­a­cy case that US of­fi­cials made against Yu Xue came just ahead of sev­er­al re­cent in­stances where Chi­nese sci­en­tists were ex­pelled from their jobs at MD An­der­son and Emory for mis­con­duct — fail­ing to dis­close re­search and busi­ness ties in Chi­na. In the most re­cent case, Emory fired two sci­en­tists born in Chi­na — nat­u­ral­ized US cit­i­zens Xi­ao­jiang Li and Shi­hua Li — and shut down their lab, or­der­ing sev­er­al post-docs in the lab back to Chi­na.

The sci­en­tists, though, have fired back, say­ing that the uni­ver­si­ty had act­ed im­prop­er­ly and that their ties to Chi­nese re­search or­ga­ni­za­tions were dis­closed.

There may well be more of these cas­es com­ing up, as the US gov­ern­ment and the NIH have put uni­ver­si­ties on no­tice that they’re be­ing vig­i­lant about los­ing im­por­tant and ex­pen­sive re­search in­for­ma­tion to the Asian pow­er­house.

Following a promise last year to go “big and fast in breast cancer,” Gilead has secured a win for Trodelvy in the most common form.

The drug was approved to treat HR-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer patients who’ve already received endocrine-based therapy and at least two other systemic therapies for metastatic cancer, Gilead announced on Friday.

Trodelvy won its first indication in metastatic triple-negative breast cancer back in 2020, and has since added urothelial cancer to the list. HR-positive HER2-negative breast cancer accounts for roughly 70% of new breast cancer cases worldwide per year, according to senior VP of oncology clinical development Bill Grossman, and many patients develop resistance to endocrine-based therapies or worsen on chemotherapy.

Sanofi expects its RSV antibody jointly developed with AstraZeneca will be available next season, executive VP of vaccines Thomas Triomphe announced on the company’s quarterly call.

Beyfortus, also known as nirsevimab, was approved in the EU back in November and is currently under FDA review with an expected decision coming in the third quarter of this year. The news comes as the FDA plans to hold advisory committee meetings over the next couple months to review RSV vaccines from Pfizer and GSK.

After a whopping $4 billion asset buy from Nimbus Therapeutics, along with a $400 million deal with Hutchmed for a colorectal cancer drug, Takeda executives touted pipeline optimism on its latest earnings call this week.

That’s because the TYK2 inhibitor for psoriasis Takeda is getting from Nimbus, along with the Hutchmed fruquintinib commercialization outside of China, are just two of what it reports are 10 late-stage development programs of promising candidates.