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Foresight Diagnostics Founders Respond to Roche Lawsuit, Says Claims Asserted in Bad Faith

This article has been updated to clarify that this court filing was made by Diehn and Alizadeh as individuals and not on behalf of the company as a whole.

NEW YORK – Foresight Diagnostics founders Maximilian Diehn and Arash Ash Alizadeh, as individuals, said in a court document filed on Wednesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California that the claims made by Roche in a lawsuit concerning trade secrets are meritless and untimely.

Roche sued Foresight, Stanford University, and Diehn and Alizadeh in July, alleging that the defendants had stolen trade secrets related to cancer detection and genetic sequencing technology. Roche said in its filing that Foresight founders and Stanford professors Maximilian Diehn and Ash Alizadeh created Foresight in secret, while working for Roche as consultants and under noncompete contracts. Foresight's Clarity minimal residual disease assay is based on a technology called PhasED-Seq, which Roche claims competes with the CAPP-Seq technology that it acquired along with Diehn and Alizadeh's previous company, Capp Medical, in 2015.

In their response, Diehn and Alizadeh said that Roche's claims lack technical sense, that its trade secrets were neither secret nor owned by Roche, that Stanford owns PhasED-Seq under preexisting agreements, and that Roche filed its claims after the statute of limitations to do so had run out.

The two founders claimed in their response that PhasED-Seq and CAPP-Seq are fundamentally different, rendering Roche's claim that one is based on the other meritless.

"Roche’s claim that PhasED-Seq is based on CAPP-Seq trade secrets makes no technical sense," Diehn and Alizadeh wrote, as it tracks a different type of cancer-related mutations –– phased variants –– via a distinct data-analysis pipeline.

The two scientists also stated that the trade secrets claimed by Roche had been publicly disclosed "years ago" and that in any case, Stanford University is the owner of the CAPP-Seq know-how. Diehn and Alizadeh also pointed out that Stanford owns the PhasED-Seq technology and that they, along with Foresight Cofounder David Kurtz, who coinvented PhasED-Seq, have preexisting patent assignment agreements with Stanford that precede Roche's claims, which had been previously disclosed to Roche.

Finally, they stated that Roche has known about PhasED-Seq since 2019 and waited too long to file its claims.

Diehn and Alizadeh joined Roche in asking for a jury trial. They also asked that the court finds that Roche asserted its trade secret claims in bad faith and that Roche be made liable for any fees and costs associated with the trial.

"We believe that this lawsuit is a frivolous, unsupported, and ultimately futile attempt to disrupt market adoption of Foresight's Clarity MRD offering, which has the potential to help patients fight cancer worldwide," Foresight said in a statement made by email. "We remain confident in our ultra-sensitive MRD technologies and look forward to our continued partnership with leading researchers and customers to enable clinically actionable decisions at the moments that matter most in the patient journey."