Sanofi Thief Reprimanded

A former Sanofi research scientist is sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets.

Written byJef Akst

| 1 min read

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Yuan Li, a medicinal chemist formerly at pharmaceutical company Sanofi, has been sentenced to a year and a half in jail for downloading and selling company information.

Last year, Sanofi employees started noticing that some of their proprietary compounds—6,000 of them, according to a criminal complaint filed last June—were being made available by Newark, Delware-based Abby Pharmtech, in which Li was a 50 percent partner. After incriminating files were found on her computer, Li, who had stopped working at Sanofi last June, pled guilty to theft of trade secrets in January 2010. This April, she received a sentence of prison time and a fine of $131,000 in restitution.

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Meet the Author

Jef Akst
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Jef (an unusual nickname for Jennifer) got her master’s degree from Indiana University in April 2009 studying the mating behavior of seahorses. After four years of diving off the Gulf Coast of Tampa and performing behavioral experiments at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, she left research to pursue a career in science writing. As The Scientist's managing editor, Jef edited features and oversaw the production of the TS Digest and quarterly print magazine. In 2022, her feature on uterus transplantation earned first place in the trade category of the Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. She is a member of the National Association of Science Writers.
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