Five people have been charged with stealing trade secrets from GlaxoSmithKline, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Among those indicted are two former Glaxo scientists, Yu Xue, who worked as a protein biochemist there from 2006 until this month, and Lucy Xi, who worked there from 2008 to 2015.
Yu Xue allegedly emailed trade secrets and confidential information about a dozen products, including a number of compounds in development to treat cancer, from her work email account to her personal email account and then forwarded that information on to the other people charged in the case, according to the Journal and Stat News' Pharmalot.
The indictment further says that Yu Xue and the others formed a US company called Renopharma and two related companies in China — Nanjing Renopharma and Shanghai Renopharma — that were seeking investors to develop their own drugs, Pharmalot and the Journal note.
Peter Zeidenberg, an attorney for Yu Xue, tells the WSJ that she has pleaded not guilty and denies the allegations.