JHL's Judas Kiss: an Inside Look at JHL Biotech's Theft from Genentech

The sentencing this week of two executives indicted last year for theft of trade secrets from Roche subsidiary Genentech nearly brought an end to the long-running saga of attempts to use intellectual property from the South San Francisco-based company to become first to market in China with a Rituxan biosimilar.

Executives from the Taiwan-based company formerly known as JHL Biotech recruited research scientists from Genentech to steal trade secrets related to several cancer drugs, in order to hasten the development of biosimilar drugs for the Chinese market. A little more than five years ago, an anonymous whistleblower at Genentech alerted the company to the scheme that was already years old at that time.