Sidley Wins Summary Judgment for Chemo Research, S.L. in Trade Secret and Unfair Competition Case

On June 26, 2026, Sidley secured a complete victory for Chemo Research, S.L. (Chemo Research), a global pharmaceutical company, in a US$500 million trade secret and unfair competition dispute spanning more than seven years, three continents, and multiple jurisdictional proceedings.

The dispute centered on benznidazole, a drug used to treat Chagas disease, a neglected tropical disease that affects more than 10 million people worldwide. For decades, no drug had received FDA approval to treat Chagas disease in the United States, making treatment difficult to obtain.

Beginning in 2015, Chemo Research sought FDA approval for benznidazole and committed to making the drug available at no or low cost to patients in need. A competing pharmaceutical company also sought approval and publicly announced plans to charge tens of thousands of dollars for a course of treatment.

Chemo Research obtained FDA approval first, and the FDA awarded the company a Priority Review Voucher potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The losing competitor, Madison Joint Venture (Madison), then sued, alleging that Chemo Research had improperly used Argentine clinical trial data in its FDA application and claiming that Madison held exclusive rights to use the data in regulatory submissions. A central part of Chemo Research’s defense was that Madison held no such exclusive rights because the data came from publicly available scientific research funded by the World Health Organization and Argentina’s Ministry of Health. 

After more than seven years of litigation, the court granted summary judgment to Chemo Research, holding that Madison did not have exclusive rights to use the data. 

The Sidley team included Benjamin Mundel (Antitrust and Competition), Christopher Eiswerth (Supreme Court, Appellate, and Litigation Strategies), Ausjia Perlow (Commercial Litigation and Disputes), and Victor Hiltner (Supreme Court, Appellate, and Litigation Strategies). AmLaw Litigation Daily honored the team with “Litigator of the Week Runners-Up” for its work.