Mark Tim­ney, the ex-Pur­due Phar­ma CEO named in dozens of law­suits against the Oxy­Con­tin mak­er, stands to earn over $85 mil­lion in No­var­tis’s $9.7 bil­lion buy­out of the Med­i­cines Com­pa­ny.

Tim­ney joined the Med­i­cines Com­pa­ny as CEO in De­cem­ber, af­ter four years helm­ing the com­pa­ny broad­ly con­sid­ered to be at the heart of the opi­oid abuse cri­sis. SEC fil­ings from the time of his hire show he agreed to pur­chase $500,000 worth of stock at the time and was al­so grant­ed one mil­lion per­for­mance and time-vest­ed stock op­tions.

Every em­ploy­ee stock op­tion will vest per the agree­ment and No­var­tis is of­fer­ing $85 per share. With 30,000 shares he owned as of a Sep­tem­ber fil­ing and pur­chased for $21.60 a share, Tim­ney could take home a lit­tle over $87 mil­lion.

A spokesper­son for the Med­i­cines Com­pa­ny de­clined to com­ment on ex­ec­u­tive com­pen­sa­tion.

Tim­ney re­mains a named de­fen­dant in over 30 on­go­ing law­suits against Pur­due Phar­ma, the drug gi­ant ac­cused of mis­lead­ing doc­tors on the ad­dic­tive­ness of its best-sell­ing drug. Tim­ney, the Con­necti­cut At­tor­ney Gen­er­al’s com­plaint al­leges, di­rect­ed his sales­force to tout the sup­posed abuse-de­ter­rent tech­nol­o­gy in Oxy­Con­tin even as he gave in­ter­nal pre­sen­ta­tions ac­knowl­edg­ing that the tech­nol­o­gy was un­like­ly to work and pa­tients would con­tin­ue to be­come ad­dict­ed.

Tim­ney and his pre­de­ces­sor John Stew­art “par­tic­i­pat­ed di­rect­ly in Pur­due’s un­fair and de­cep­tive acts and prac­tices al­leged in this com­plaint,” the com­plaint al­leges. “They had the au­thor­i­ty to con­trol Pur­due’s busi­ness prac­tices, in­clud­ing com­plete over­sight and con­trol over Pur­due’s cor­po­rate poli­cies and ac­tiv­i­ties. They were ac­tive­ly in­volved in Pur­due’s busi­ness af­fairs and ac­tive­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed in the mak­ing of com­pa­ny pol­i­cy. They knew of the un­fair and de­cep­tive acts and prac­tices al­leged here­in, and their ac­tions and in­ac­tions re­sult­ed in the mis­con­duct.”

The Mass­a­chu­sets com­plaint al­leges “John Stew­art, Mark Tim­ney, and Craig Lan­dau each di­rect­ed Pur­due’s de­cep­tion as CEO of Pur­due Phar­ma.”

Med­i­cines Com­pa­ny spokesman Michael Blash de­fend­ed Tim­ney’s re­sume and work for the biotech in an email to End­points News: “Mark is an ac­com­plished and com­mit­ted health­care leader whose lead­er­ship has served the com­pa­ny well dur­ing this im­por­tant strate­gic phase.”

For the first time in 12 years, the FDA has approved a new frontline treatment for the most common form of liver cancer.

The agency okayed a combination of Roche’s anti-VEGF antibody Avastin and their immunotherapy Tecentriq for patients with unresectable or metastatic hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The approval comes two weeks after Roche and their big biotech sub Genentech published Phase III results showing the combo improved both progression-free survival and, crucially, helped patients live longer than the long-running standard-of-care, Bayer’s Nexavar.

With a Bristol Myers Squibb endorsement in tow, Versant-backed cancer drug developer Repare Therapeutics has set its sights on a Nasdaq debut.

On Friday, the Montreal-based company with operations in Cambridge, Massachusetts that is yet to enter the clinic, unveiled plans for a $100 million IPO, banking on its “synthetic lethality” platform.

The basic idea is to target the genetic basis of tumors, a common idea across precision oncology medicines. But instead of targeting the perpetrator mutation directly, the compound is designed to go after the other gene in the gene pair. The rationale is based on the decades-old genetic principle that indicates two mutations are lethal only when combined together.