Juno con­tin­ues to feel the fall­out from its painful, and very brief, tri­al hold for its lead CAR-T JCAR015. In a new­ly filed class ac­tion suit, in­vestors say that they were pur­pose­ful­ly mis­led by Juno ex­ec­u­tives, who kept qui­et about the first sus­pi­cious pa­tient death in May.

Juno CEO Hans Bish­op

Ac­cord­ing to the suit, the com­pa­ny was prompt­ed to tell reg­u­la­tors about the death due to a cere­bral ede­ma. But when it came to its June earn­ings an­nounce­ment, the com­pa­ny stayed silent about any deaths, stick­ing to ev­i­dence of grade 3 neu­ro­tox­i­c­i­ty. And with the com­pa­ny tout­ing its re­sults, CEO Hans Bish­op cashed out of $8.6 mil­lion in shares.

There’s noth­ing un­usu­al about class ac­tion law­suits in the wake of clin­i­cal set­backs. A ros­ter of firms makes a busi­ness out of rou­tine­ly tar­get­ing biotechs that have had to con­cede tri­al fail­ures. And on­ly oc­ca­sion­al­ly have the feds come back to charge ex­ecs with pur­pose­ful­ly mis­lead­ing in­vestors.

Still, this lat­est suit rais­es fresh ques­tions about the time­line of deaths and Juno’s in­ter­ac­tions with the FDA on its lead­ing clin­i­cal study. At the same time Juno an­nounced that a string of deaths had spurred the agency to drop a hold on the study, Bish­op and oth­ers had al­ready fin­gered the ad­di­tion of flu­dara­bine as the prime cause of the lethal neu­ro­tox­i­c­i­ty. And reg­u­la­tors were will­ing to lift the hold just a few days lat­er, even as ques­tions con­tin­ued to sur­face about the cause.

Juno con­tin­ues to suf­fer the con­se­quences, though. As we re­port­ed, the set­back forced Juno to re­vise its time­line for an ex­pect­ed ap­proval, shov­ing back any for­mal mar­ket­ing de­ci­sion to 2018. And that leaves Kite in com­mand of the lead with a ri­val CAR-T that the biotech plans to hus­tle to the FDA be­fore the end of this year.

Soon af­ter the hold was lift­ed at Juno, I asked the FDA a few ques­tions about the tim­ing and cir­cum­stances around the speed of its re­sponse. Cit­ing pri­va­cy poli­cies, the agency de­clined to an­swer.

It may have to pro­vide an­swers to the lawyers, though, if the suit goes any­where.

Microcap biotech Seelos Therapeutics is halting enrollment of its study in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (also known as Machado-Joseph disease) because of “financial considerations,” and in order to focus on other studies, the company said today, adding that the pause would be temporary.

The study will continue with the patients who have already enrolled, and the data from them will be used to decide whether to continue enrolling others in the future.

Otonomy may be shutting down, but the lessons learned there will live on at another biotech working on new treatments for hearing loss.

San Francisco-based Spiral Therapeutics has bought certain assets related to three of Otonomy’s programs, ranging from data, patent rights, and know-how to inventory. That includes data around Otonomy’s twice-failed lead program, OTO-104 (Otividex), a sustained-exposure formulation of dexamethasone.