A Chinese researcher was sentenced to 30 months in prison on Feb. 1 for conspiring to steal U.S. trade secrets and make a profit in China. Chen Li, 47, a former resident of Dublin, Ohio, worked at the Ohio-based Research Institute at the Nationwide Children’s Hospital from 2008 until 2018. Her husband, Zhou Yu, 50, worked at a different medical research lab at the same hospital from 2007 until 2017. In 2015, they founded a biotech company in China, which sold exosome “isolation kits” based on exosome-related trade secrets stolen from the hospital—without the hospital’s knowledge. Beijing GenExosome was the name of the China-based company the couple set up. The company was eventually acquired in October 2017 by GenExosome Technologies, a subsidiary of the New Jersey-based biotech firm Avalon GloboCare Corp. Exosomes are small sacs containing nucleic acid and proteins and play an important role in cell-to-cell communication. They have …