BD Accuses Cytek of Stealing Trade Secrets

Becton Dickinson (BD) is the latest medtech company to take a competitor to court for alleged trade secret theft. The company recently filed a lawsuit against Cytek Biosciences and nine former BD employees, claiming that when these employees left BD to work for Cytek they retained and misused BD's "valuable, highly confidential, proprietary information," including thousands of technical files they had downloaded from BD's computer systems onto removable storage media while still employed with the company. "Cytek recently hired away nearly a dozen scientists, engineers, and business people from BD and employed them to develop products that compete unfairly with their former company's product lines," BD said in the complaint. The company said it gave Cytek a list of serial numbers of unrecovered storage media known to have been used by the employees, and that the vast majority of the storage devices have not been recovered. Around 2012, BD started developing a spectral flow cytometer, a new type of flow cytometer designed to analyze the light detected by a flow cytometer differently to optimize sensitivity and flexibility. The company said this project was known internally as Project Newton. According to the court documents, the nine employees named in the lawsuit worked on Project Newton and/or other confidential flow cytometer products, and their collective exposure to BD's confidential information spanned the areas of physics, chemistry, biology, fluidics, optics, electr...
Source: MDDI - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: Medical Device Business Source Type: news