The United States has asked Switzerland to extradite a Chinese researcher accused of helping his sister steal valuable secrets from pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), officials said Tuesday.

Gongda Xue, a Chinese national living in Switzerland, is the brother of Yu Xue, who last year pleaded guilty to conspiracy to steal trade secrets from GSK in order to benefit a Chinese pharmaceutical company called Renopharma.

A US indictment alleges that Gongda Xue, who previously worked for the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI) in Basel, performed tests on information that his sister stole from a GSK facility in Pennsylvania.

Gongda Xue was arrested by Swiss authorities in Basel on May 28, following a request from US authorities, Swiss justice office spokeswoman Ingrid Ryser told AFP.

An FMI spokeswoman, Isabelle Baumann, told AFP that Gongda Xue worked at the institute "as a postdoctoral research trainee from 2008 until 2014."

She said FMI was not aware of any suspected wrongdoing during his time.

"Once the incident was called to the attention of FMI by the US authorities, FMI... cooperated and contributed facts and information to the investigation," Baumann said by email.

She noted that allegations against Xue involve him "assisting his sister in misappropriating trade secrets from GSK, not from misappropriating trade secrets from FMI."

Switzerland's federal court this week rejected an appeal by Xue seeking his release and declared him a flight risk.

Ryser told AFP the justice office was moving forward with the extradition process following an initial review of the facts, but that a final decision on whether to send Xue to the US had not yet been taken.

When it announced Yu Xue's guilty plea last year, the US Justice Department described the case as "economic warfare."

It claimed that Renopharma, based in Nanjing, China, was "bankrolled by the Chinese government" and was committed to stealing information that could have required more than $1 billion (892 million euros) to research and develop.

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