Back at the be­gin­ning of this year, Eli Lil­ly’s US chief Alex Azar left his post dur­ing the big ex­ec­u­tive shuf­fle as Dave Ricks re­placed John Lech­leit­er at the helm. But he may be about to line up a much bet­ter job than the one he ex­it­ed.

Politi­co re­ports that Azar is a fa­vorite in the race to re­place Tom Price, the ex­pe­ri­enced po­lit­i­cal hand who had a weak­ness for pri­vate jets. De­pend­ing on who the re­porters were talk­ing to in the ad­min­is­tra­tion, Azar had ei­ther been short­list­ed or was al­ready in­for­mal­ly tapped for the job.

The move would bring Azar back to Wash­ing­ton, where he did a stint as gen­er­al coun­sel and deputy sec­re­tary at HHS un­der George W Bush. Azar — a Yale Law School grad — was on one of my pan­els about 15 months ago and ably rep­re­sent­ed Lil­ly with a sharp and con­cise rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the kind of op­por­tu­ni­ties and pit­falls a Big Phar­ma like Lil­ly has to nav­i­gate every day.

Azar did not im­me­di­ate­ly jump to an­oth­er po­si­tion in the in­dus­try, up­ping the odds that he was pushed out rather than jumped as Ricks be­gan to re­struc­ture the com­pa­ny from top to bot­tom. Azar set up a con­sul­tan­cy called Seraphim Strate­gies in Feb­ru­ary as he “ex­plored lead­er­ship op­por­tu­ni­ties.”

What­ev­er Azar’s thoughts on Lil­ly, he’d be viewed as a de­pend­able and tal­ent­ed ad­vo­cate for the in­dus­try, some­one who isn’t like­ly to dis­com­fort the Big Phar­ma play­ers.

De­pend­ing on when he’s talk­ing, Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump has been a caus­tic crit­ic of the bio­phar­ma in­dus­try’s drug pric­ing poli­cies. Just yes­ter­day he dou­bled down on his ear­li­er crit­i­cisms, not­ing that US drug prices are a mul­ti­ple of what they cost in oth­er coun­tries with a sin­gle-pay­er sys­tem — some­thing he would nev­er abide.

“Some­times it’s a frac­tion of what we pay in this coun­try,” Trump said in pre­pared re­marks. “The drug com­pa­nies frankly are get­ting away with mur­der and we want to bring our prices down to what oth­er coun­tries pay.”

We’ve been sub­si­diz­ing oth­er coun­tries, he added, “pay­ing dou­ble, triple, quadru­ple.”

But un­like his first slap­downs, this time Trump’s at­tack bare­ly caused a rip­ple in the in­dus­try, where top ex­ecs led by Mer­ck’s Ken Fra­zier ex­it­ed the pres­i­dent’s in­dus­try ad­vi­so­ry groups in the wake of the con­tro­ver­sy over the Char­lottesvil­lle, VA con­fronta­tion by ex­trem­ist or­ga­ni­za­tions.

One oth­er hot­ly ru­mored can­di­date for this job has been FDA com­mis­sion­er Scott Got­tlieb, who’s made an im­pres­sive en­try in­to a job that calls on the fed­er­al agency to bal­ance the gold stan­dard on ef­fi­ca­cy and safe­ty drug de­vel­op­ment with the man­date to speed new ap­provals. Got­tlieb re­cent­ly said he’d pre­fer to stay at the FDA, where his tal­ents lay, with­out ac­tu­al­ly rul­ing out a quick pro­mo­tion.

It ap­pears he may get his wish.

Deputy Health and Hu­man Ser­vices Sec­re­tary Alex Azar meets re­porters at de­part­ment head­quar­ters on June 8, 2006 to an­nounce the ap­proval of Gar­dasil, the first vac­cine de­vel­oped to pro­tect women against cer­vi­cal can­cer. AP Pho­to/Evan Vuc­ci

Tadataka Yamada, a towering physician-scientist who made his name in academia before transforming drug development at GlaxoSmithKline and developing vaccines for malaria and meningitis at the Gates Foundation, died unexpectedly of natural causes at his home in Seattle Wednesday morning.

He was 76. Frazier Healthcare Partners’ David Socks confirmed his death.

Known widely by the mononym “Tachi,” Yamada had a globetrotting career and arrived in industry relatively late in life. A 2004 Independent article noted GSK had asked Yamada to stay on beyond his approaching 60th birthday, the company’s usual retirement age. Yamada would continue working for the next 17 years, steering the Gates Foundation’s global health division for 6 years, funding Jim Wilson’s gene therapy work when few would touch it, launching Takeda Vaccines and co-founding a series of high-profile biotechs.

In a major shift, and a big win for the pharmaceutical industry, the FDA said Friday that moving forward it intends to regulate products that meet both the device and drug definitions as devices.

The announcement is the result of a loss in court for the agency in April, when the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said that Genus Medical Technologies’ contrast agent barium sulfate, known as Vanilla SilQ, should not be regulated as a drug, as the FDA had said, but as a medical device.