Alnylam Slams Dicerna with Trade Secret Complaint

How times have changed.  Four years ago, Alnylam found itself on the receiving end of a trade secret lawsuit regarding the delivery technology du jour, SNALP LNP then, in which it ended up paying near-bankrupt Tekmira ~$70M to settle the allegations.  As I opined back then, Alnylam seemingly used almost any means to get access to the know-how to make SNALP LNP delivery work in primates in an effort to rid itself of the reliance on Tekmira, the inventors.

At that time, all Alnylam's CEO had to say on the topic of honoring trade secrets: 'you pay for it, you own it'.

Tonight, Alnylam claims to be the victim of similar trade secret misappropriations surrounding RNAi delivery technology.  In this case, Alnylam alleges (see Complaint) that Dicerna had hired ex-Merck RNAi scientists to gain access to critical GalNAc trade secrets invented at Merck after Merck sold their RNAi assets to Alnylam and laid off related employees.

An interesting aside of this is that it appears, contrary to representations by Alnylam, that the GalNAc-ESC technology were invented at Merck, not in-house at Alnylam.

The Complaint makes it clear that Alnylam feels threatened by the technologically very direct competition.  In a way, Dicerna’s new strategy was to become Alnylam's clone.  What could be worse, given the differences in the RNAi trigger lengths (~19bp Tuschl-type siRNAs by Alnylam; 25/27 and longer Dicer-substrate versions by Dicerna) and the apparent importance of stability/degradation in GalNAc technology, there is the distinct possibility that Dicerna’s version, everything else being equal, would outperform (or underperform) Alnylam’s.

In light of recent apparently rapid progress at Dicerna on GalNAc technology and the timing of events, the idea that Dicerna may have benefited from the GalNAc know-how of ex-Merck scientists does not seem far-fetched.  

It is unclear to me, however, whether you can expect expert oligonucleotide chemists to suddenly forget everything about their former job. 

Alnylam obviously takes care of that problem by enforcing harsh non-compete and pay-for-silence practices against their former employees, meaning that if you are an RNAi scientist that job at Alnylam will be your last RNAi job in the industry, period. 

Looking forward, I predict that the outcome of the case will hinge less on the physical documents that were alleged to have been ‘misappropriated’, but on whether or not the ex-Merck scientists could have re-invented GalNAc-ESC based on their skills and publicly available information (including from Alnylam) at the time.  If so, then Alnylam only has Merck to blame that it does not force their employees to leave their profession when they lay them off.

Regardless, the GalNAc-ESC genie is out of the bottle.