A hospital researcher on April 19 was sentenced to 33 months in prison for conspiring to steal trade secrets from an Ohio children’s hospital to sell in China, according to the Justice Department.
Zhou Yu, 51, pleaded guilty in December 2020 to stealing at least five trade secrets relating to exosome research from the Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s Research Institute in Columbus, Ohio, where he had worked for 10 years until 2017. Exosomes are small sacs of fluid released from cells that have increasingly been used in the research, identification, and treatment of a range of diseases, including liver fibrosis and liver cancer.
Zhou’s co-conspirator was his wife, Chen Li, 48, who also worked as a researcher at another lab in the institute. She was sentenced in February to 30 months in prison for her role in the scheme after also pleading guilty.
“Zhou and his wife executed a scheme over the course of several years to set up businesses in China, steal American research, and profit from doing so,” acting U.S. attorney Vipal J. Patel for the Southern District of Ohio said in a statement.
The couple started a company in China to create and sell exosome “isolation kits,” using stolen trade secrets from the institute, court documents said.
They also received funding from Chinese authorities, including the State Administration of Foreign Expert Affairs and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, prosecutors said.
“Zhou’s greed was encouraged and enabled by a series of Chinese Government programs which incentivize thievery in an attempt to supplement China’s own research and development goals on the back of American ingenuity and investment,” assistant attorney general for the department’s National Security Division, John C. Demers, said in a statement.
