February 20, 2025 - Medical diagnostics company Guardant Health has sued rival Natera in California federal court for allegedly stealing more than 6,500 trade secret documents related to a blood test for cancer detection.

Guardant said in the lawsuit that its Shield test was the first FDA-approved blood test for early-stage cancer.Guardant alleges that two former employees-scientists Alan Selewa and Catalin Barbacioru-transferred thousands of confidential documents prior to leaving their jobs to an external hard drive and shared those documents with Natera to help it develop a competing test. Guardant has now applied to the court for an injunction to prohibit the former employees from continuing to disclose company secrets and for Natera to return the stolen information and pay an unspecified amount of damages.

This is not the first time the two companies have gone to court. in May 2021, Guardant Health sued Natera alleging misrepresentation and unfair competition for making misleading statements when comparing the two companies' colorectal cancer blood tests. in November 2024, a jury ruled that Natera was in violation of the law and ordered it to pay Guardant Health 292.5 million in damages, including $175.5 million in punitive damages.

This case is one of several contentious legal disputes between competitors in the genomics industry. Genomics, which involves the science of the human genome, has grown rapidly in recent years. The global genomics market is valued at nearly $34 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow to $157 billion by 2033, according to a report by biopharmaceutical news outlet BioSpace.