Base editing biotech Beam Therapeutics is suing one of its newest rivals, alleging that the upstart company stole the secrets behind one of its lead programs and used them to craft a competing therapy.
The allegations center on Zi Jun (Emma) Wang, Ph.D., whom the suit says was employed at Beam as a scientist from March 2021 to January 31, 2022. While working at the company, in July 2021, Beam claims, Wang secretly founded a Chinese startup—YolTech Therapeutics—to pursue a base editing therapy for alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency (AATD).
AATD is also the target of BEAM-302, one of Beam’s most advanced candidates. Wang formed YolTech with Yuxuan (Jensen) Wu, Ph.D., who is also named as a defendant.
“It is now evident that YolTech focused on developing a program designed to treat AATD that would ultimately emerge as a direct competitor to BEAM-302,” Beam wrote in the lawsuit, filed on Sept. 25 in United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
News of the lawsuit was first reported by Bloomberg Law.
What’s more, Beam alleges that after Wang founded YolTech, she accessed Beam files and records “she had never opened before, across technical areas well beyond her own, including at night and on weekends.”
The result, the company claims, is a base editing candidate called YOLT-202 that is “strikingly similar” to Beam’s drug. Beam says that it reviewed a June 2022 patent application, filed in China with Wang as sole author, and discovered that it “incorporates and reflects Beam’s trade secret information concerning the design of delivery systems for base editors.”
In addition to structural similarities, both base editors also target the same disease-causing mutation in the SERPINA1 gene, Beam says. Base editing is a specific type of gene editing where one letter of DNA is swapped for another. BEAM-302 and SERP-01 are both designed to swap an adenine for a guanine in the SERPINA1 gene, so that patients no longer make a mutant form of the alpha-1 antitrypsin protein.
YOLT-202 has since found its way to the U.S. through the creation of Serapha Bio this past June. Serapha launched with $230 million and is also in the process of merging with Boundless Bio. The startup, backed by a syndicate of investors led by RA Capital Management and RTW Investments, licensed the rights to YolTech’s base editor outside of China, which it is developing as SERP-01.
Serapha and YolTech are also named as defendants in Beam’s lawsuit.
“Serapha categorically refutes Beam’s claims and will vigorously defend the company,” a Serapha spokesperson told Fierce.
At the time of publication, YolTech had not responded to Fierce’s request for comment.
Wang’s presence has since been scrubbed from the websites of both YolTech and Serapha, Beam alleges. Though Wang is interim chief technology officer of Serapha and co-founder of YolTech, she doesn’t appear on the listed leadership teams of either company.
The gene editing world is no stranger to scuffles over intellectual property. Most recently, Prime Medicine prevailed against Beam in a patent dispute alleging that the former had violated a collaboration agreement by developing a therapy for AATD.