The fight be­tween Amarin and an ac­tivist in­vestor group led by a Carl Ic­ahn pro­tégé is get­ting dirty.

On Wednes­day, Saris­sa Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment — led by Ic­ahn’s for­mer head of health­care in­vest­ments Alex Den­ner — put out a state­ment de­cry­ing a po­ten­tial Amarin board re­or­ga­ni­za­tion as a “sham.” Amarin re­spond­ed Thurs­day morn­ing call­ing Saris­sa’s state­ment “in­ac­cu­rate and mis­lead­ing” while say­ing they have “no plan, no new ideas.”

Amarin shares $AM­RN were down about 5% in ear­ly Thurs­day trad­ing.

It’s not the first time the two have come to blows this year, with Saris­sa launch­ing the open­ing sal­vo last week when it at­tacked Amarin ex­ecs’ “cha­rade.” The roots of this fight, Saris­sa says, harken back to Amarin’s dwin­dling stock and al­leged loss of more than $840 mil­lion in eq­ui­ty last year.

As Saris­sa told it Wednes­day:

In 2022 alone, Amarin stock lost over two-thirds of its val­ue, and share­hold­ers lost over $840 mil­lion in eq­ui­ty.* The Eu­ro­pean launch is be­hind sched­ule, re­im­burse­ment in Ger­many (typ­i­cal­ly one of the largest mar­kets in Eu­rope) ap­pears im­per­iled, and spend­ing mis­man­age­ment has weak­ened the cash cof­fers. Yet the board has the au­dac­i­ty to state pub­licly, “the Com­pa­ny made sol­id progress in 2022, against its strate­gic ob­jec­tives.”

Amarin, mean­while, hit back with the ac­cu­sa­tion that most of Saris­sa’s pro­posed board mem­bers are not qual­i­fied to run a pub­lic com­pa­ny:

The Board in­ter­viewed three of Saris­sa’s five pro­posed can­di­dates, all of whom are Saris­sa em­ploy­ees, along­side in­de­pen­dent can­di­dates the Board had iden­ti­fied. In ad­di­tion, Saris­sa de­mand­ed that at least three of their can­di­dates be ap­point­ed in a mat­ter of days af­ter the names were fi­nal­ly shared with the Com­pa­ny. Of note, two of Saris­sa’s orig­i­nal five pro­posed can­di­dates were ju­nior Saris­sa re­search an­a­lysts with less than five years of work ex­pe­ri­ence.

The past week’s back-and-forth came af­ter a year in which Amarin found it­self a vic­tim of the lengthy biotech bear mar­ket. Last June, the com­pa­ny en­act­ed se­ri­ous cost-cut­ting mea­sures by lay­ing off 40% of staff and watch­ing its CFO de­part. The moves came af­ter a patent fight over its sole ap­proved drug Vas­cepa, which Amarin lost in a Supreme Court case in 2021.

But Amarin is stand­ing its ground, at least for now. The biotech’s stock price is up about 48% in the last month.

New York City is investing $20 million in biotech this year in the form of a 50,000-square-foot “innovation space” at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, complete with offices, research laboratories and events and programming space to grow biotech startups and companies.

Mayor Eric Adams said during his State of The City Address last Thursday that there will be an “emphasis” on making more opportunities for women and people of color to further diversify the industry. The City first reported the news.

Boehringer Ingelheim uncorked some positive results suggesting that Spevigo can help prevent flare-ups in patients with a severe form of psoriasis, months after the drug was approved to treat existing flares.

Spevigo, an IL-36R antibody also known as spesolimab, met its primary and a key secondary endpoint in the Phase IIb EFFISAYIL 2 trial in patients with generalized pustular psoriasis (GPP), Boehringer announced on Monday. While the company is keeping the hard numbers under wraps until later this year, it said in a news release that it anticipates sharing the results with regulators.

AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi won an appeals court win on Monday, as the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found that the companies cannot be forced to provide 340B-discounted drugs purchased by hospitals from an unlimited number of community and specialty pharmacies.

“Legal duties do not spring from silence,” the decision says as the court makes clear that the federal government’s interpretation of the “supposed requirement” that the 340B program compels drugmakers to supply their discounted drugs to an unlimited number of contract pharmacies is not correct, noting:

A US appeals court has ruled against Johnson & Johnson’s use of bankruptcy to deal with mounting talc lawsuits, deciding that doing so would “create a legal blind spot.”

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a previous bankruptcy court decision on Monday, calling for the dismissal of a Chapter 11 filing by J&J’s subsidiary LTL Management.

Faced with more than 38,000 lawsuits alleging its talc-based products caused cancer, J&J spun its talc liabilities into a separate company called LTL Management back in October 2021 and filed for bankruptcy, a controversial move colloquially referred to as a “Texas two-step” bankruptcy. Claimants argued that the strategy is a misuse of the US bankruptcy code — and on Monday, a panel of judges agreed.

The FDA has found a brand new director of the Digital Health Center of Excellence in Troy Tazbaz, a former senior vice president at Oracle.

According to Tazbaz’s LinkedIn, he took a five-month break after leaving an 11-year career at Oracle before joining the FDA in January. Stat News first reported the hire. Tazbaz also said on his LinkedIn that he biked all the way from Chesapeake Bay to the San Francisco Bay over 58 days during his career break.