Douglas Fambrough III had good news about his fledgling biotech company when he met with a roomful of investment analysts in a swanky midtown Manhattan hotel on a November morning in 2014.
During a half-hour presentation at the Lotte New York Palace, the chief executive of Dicerna Pharmaceuticals Inc. showed 19 slides that gave an overview of his Watertown, Mass., firm. The 11th one featured a diagram with circles and squiggly lines. It represented a new delivery system for gene-silencing drugs that Dicerna hoped to develop to treat rare disorders.
But when executives at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals — Dicerna’s multibillion-dollar rival in Cambridge, Mass. — later saw the slide on Dicerna’s website, they thought it looked familiar. They sued Dicerna, accusing it of stealing trade secrets that Alnylam had acquired when it bought a third drug company’s subsidiary for $175 million. Dicerna denies the accusation.
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