Ex-Trader Takes Sloan-Kettering to Court Over Gene Therapy Deal

Patrick Girondi, a former commodities trader from Chicago, lives in Italy these days. But for the last couple of years, he’s been spending weeks at a time crashing at a friend’s apartment in Manhattan, waging a bare-knuckle and uphill legal battle against two well-regarded names in medical science: Bluebird Bio, a cutting edge gene-therapy company, and Sloan Kettering Institute, the research arm of the famous cancer center.

Girondi's company, Errant Gene Therapeutics, sued them in New York state court in 2017, alleging that Sloan Kettering Institute tricked it into turning over potentially groundbreaking treatment. Girondi helped develop the treatment to save his son, Rocco, from beta thalassemia, a relatively rare and potentially fatal blood disorder.

Then, Girondi claimed, Sloan Kettering mothballed his work to favor Bluebird, whose chief executive had a prior business relationship with the cancer center's boss.