In a stun­ning turn of events, FDA com­mis­sion­er Scott Got­tlieb is re­sign­ing from his post and leav­ing of­fice in a mat­ter of weeks.

The Wash­ing­ton Post re­port­ed that Got­tlieb, who’s been com­mut­ing from Con­necti­cut, told ad­min­is­tra­tion of­fi­cials that he wants to spend more time with his fam­i­ly.

Got­tlieb ar­rived at the FDA short­ly af­ter the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion took of­fice, vow­ing to up­hold the gold stan­dard in drug de­vel­op­ment while do­ing every­thing pos­si­ble to fa­cil­i­tate drug mak­ers’ work — at least for the le­git­i­mate play­ers.

He has been enor­mous­ly pop­u­lar in his short stint, with the vast ma­jor­i­ty of bio­phar­ma ex­ecs ac­claim­ing his work at the agency. He’s al­so been pop­u­lar with Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, find­ing a se­cure spot for him­self in an ad­min­is­tra­tion not­ed for rapid turnover.

So what hap­pened here?

Just weeks ago Got­tlieb in­sist­ed on Twit­ter that ru­mors of his pend­ing de­par­ture from the agency were flat wrong. He tweet­ed:

We’ve got a lot im­por­tant pol­i­cy we’ll ad­vance this year. I look for­ward to shar­ing my 2019 strate­gic roadmap soon.

The big ques­tion now is who will re­place him. Trump freaked out many ex­ecs by en­ter­tain­ing Pe­ter Thiel’s push for a lib­er­tar­i­an ap­proach, which would have erased many of the bar­ri­ers to in­tro­duc­ing new drugs — along with the cred­i­bil­i­ty that goes with an FDA sanc­tion. Trump, though, has many open po­si­tions in his ad­min­is­tra­tion, in­clud­ing Cab­i­net-lev­el posts. Stephen Os­troff has tak­en the helm on a strict­ly in­ter­im ba­sis be­fore, but he re­tired last fall, re­placed by Wal­mart ex­ec­u­tive Frank Yian­nas.

Got­tlieb’s let­ter of res­ig­na­tion in­cludes his list of ac­com­plish­ments for the past 23 months, from a record num­ber of new drug ap­provals to their con­tin­ued work on mas­ter­ing new tech­nolo­gies and tak­ing on e-cig­a­rette use by mi­nors.

I’m con­fi­dent that the FDA will con­tin­ue to ad­vance all these ef­forts, and many oth­er goals.

In­dus­try lead­ers quick­ly not­ed the sig­nif­i­cance of the move to­day.

“We’re go­ing to miss him. He was a ter­rif­ic leader of the FDA,” Al­ny­lam CEO and BIO chair­man John Maraganore told me.

“It’s a damn shame,” Tweet­ed long­time se­r­i­al en­tre­pre­neur Mike Gilman, echo­ing the sharp lev­el of dis­ap­point­ment about the news.

There are plen­ty of qual­i­fied peo­ple that this does­n't need to be a neg­a­tive. But the thing I do wor­ry about with the en­vi­ron­ment in Wash­ing­ton these days is that it will take for­ev­er for the next per­son to get ap­proved.

— Brad Lon­car (@brad­lon­car) March 5, 2019

….Scott has helped us to low­er drug prices, get a record num­ber of gener­ic drugs ap­proved and on­to the mar­ket, and so many oth­er things. He and his tal­ents will be great­ly missed!

— Don­ald J. Trump (@re­al­Don­aldTrump) March 5, 2019

Im­age: Scott Got­tlieb, com­mis­sion­er of the Food and Drug Ad­min­is­tra­tion (FDA), pos­es for por­trait pho­tographs in front of the old FDA sign at the FDA in White Oak, MD on No­vem­ber 5, 2018 The Wash­ing­ton Post

Steve Holtzman was awoken by a 1 a.m. call from a doctor at Duke University asking if he could put some pigs on a plane and fly them from Ohio to North Carolina that day. A motorcyclist had gotten into a horrific crash, the doctor explained. He believed the pigs’ livers, sutured onto the patient’s skin like an external filter, might be able to tide the young man over until a donor liver became available.

David Livingston, the Dana-Farber/Harvard Med scientist who helped shine a light on some of the key molecular drivers of breast and ovarian cancer, died unexpectedly last Sunday.

One of the senior leaders at Dana-Farber during his nearly half century of work there, Livingston was credited with shedding light on the genes that regulate cell growth, with insights into inherited BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations that helped lay the scientific foundation for targeted therapies and earlier detection that have transformed the field.

Pfizer will present its case to the FDA’s vaccine adcomm next week, seeking authorization for a lower-dose version of its Covid-19 vaccine for kids ages 5 through 12, which the Biden administration said will likely begin rolling out early next month.

Two primary doses of the 10 µg vaccine (the dose for those ages 12 and up is 30 μg) given 3 weeks apart in this group of children “have shown a favorable safety and tolerability profile, robust immune responses against all variants of concern including Delta, and vaccine efficacy of 90.7% against laboratory-confirmed symptomatic COVID-19,” the company said in briefing documents ahead of next Tuesday’s meeting of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.