As director and deputy director of the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IMCAS), we would like to clarify some points in your discussion of our involvement in an intellectual-property case (Nature 492, 323; 2012).

Without our knowledge, Shandong Hilead Biotechnology in Laiyang — a recipient of the dodecanedioic acid technology invented by IMCAS, with which Hilead collaborated to further improve this technology — filed a patent application in 2010 that listed both of us and five others as inventors (patent CN201010160266.4).

When we discovered this, we demanded that our names be dropped from the application because we had not made any technical contribution to the patent. Hilead filed an application for a change of inventors listed on the patent on 25 January 2011 to the State Intellectual Property Office of China, who approved the change on 14 February 2011 (file 2011021000026950). So the removal of our names occurred a few months before two employees at Cathay Industrial Biotech in Shanghai filed a lawsuit over the patent in June 2011.

Hilead officially apologized on 17 August 2011 in a letter to IMCAS for using our names without consent. The court decision on the lawsuit exempted us from civil liability and no apology was required from us (Beijing Higher People's Court decision 3975, 16 November 2012).