STAT+: Beam Therapeutics sues Chinese biotech, VC-backed startup, alleging theft of intellectual property

Beam Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Mass.-based gene-editing company, filed a lawsuit late last week accusing former scientist Zi Jun "Emma" Wang of stealing intellectual property. According to the suit, Wang accessed the company’s electronic laboratory notebooks late at night and on weekends and used the information she obtained to co-found YolTech Therapeutics, a Shanghai-based company.

YolTech recently made a deal with venture capital firms RA Capital and RTW to form a new startup called Serapha Bio. Both YolTech and Serapha are named as defendants in the case. The dispute arrives amid escalating tensions between American biotech companies and their Chinese counterparts.