NEW YORK – Foresight Diagnostics, Stanford University, and three individual defendants last week filed motions in the US District Court for the Northern District of California to dismiss Roche's claims in an ongoing lawsuit concerning trade secrets.
In July, Roche sued Foresight, Stanford, and Foresight Diagnostics Founders Maximilian Diehn, Arash Ash Alizadeh, and David Kurtz, alleging that Diehn and Alizadeh stole trade secrets concerning cancer detection and genetic sequencing technology. In its original filing, Roche claimed that Diehn and Alizadeh, who are Stanford professors, created Foresight in secret while working for Roche as consultants under noncompete contracts.
Foresight's Clarity minimal residual disease assay is based on its PhasED-Seq technology, which Roche said competes with its CAPP-Seq technology acquired in 2015 with Diehn and Alizadeh's previous company Capp Medical.
Roche also alleged that Diehn, Alizadeh, and Kurtz misused the technology Roche acquired to raise more than $70 million in funding for Foresight.
In October, Diehn and Alizadeh said in court documents that Roche's claims are meritless and untimely, and later that month Foresight Diagnostics filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The company said that Roche failed to show any plausible trade secrets related to the case and failed to provide plausible factual allegations that the alleged secrets have independent economic value. The firm added that Roche has failed to allege any acts of misappropriation by Foresight.
In response, Roche filed a First Amended Complaint (FAC) that uses a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature in 2020 as its main evidence of misappropriation. The paper cites improvements to CAPP-Seq made at Stanford, which Roche said demonstrates that Alizadeh and Diehn misappropriated seven Roche trade secrets. The complaint also alleges that Foresight's adapter design incorporates adapter improvements implemented and made by Roche.
In its motion to dismiss filed last week, Foresight said that the FAC failed to address the defects in the original complaints and raises additional reasons for dismissal of the suit, including that Roche failed to bring its trade secret causes of action within the three-year statute of limitations from when Foresight said Roche should have found out about the alleged trade secret misappropriation in 2020 via the Nature paper.
Foresight also said the FAC fails to differentiate between the alleged non-public trade secrets from what was already "generally known" from publications regarding CAPP-Seq and said Roche's claim for patent ownership fails because the disputed inventions were automatically assigned to Stanford under earlier agreements that take precedence over later consulting agreements with Roche.
Foresight noted that, even if Roche trade secrets were used to develop the PhasED-Seq technology, the misappropriation occurred before Foresight existed as a company, so Roche cannot claim Foresight is liable for the misappropriation.
In Diehn and Alizadeh's motion to dismiss, the doctors said that Roche's breach of contract claim against them fails because of the three-year statute of limitations and because Roche has not "alleged any facts to support its conclusory allegations" that the doctors breached the terms of any agreement.
A hearing on the motions to dismiss is scheduled for April 2, 2025.