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.”

About four months after completing an extension to its Series A, Monte Rosa Therapeutics is putting its next foot forward with another heap of cash.

The Boston-based biotech is back with $96 million in Series B financing with a goal to get its lead program ready for IND-enabling studies by the end of the year. Though Monte Rosa is keeping its specific target a secret for now, the company has been researching how to utilize its protein degradation technology in breast cancer and non-small cell lung cancer, among other areas.

Earlier this month, Flagship announced their big bet on the software half the industry is talking about, launching the AI and machine learning startup. Now, they and a couple other investors are gambling $100 million on a software that much of the public generally thinks of as a cool, IT afterthought: cloud computing.

The idea, says founder and Flagship partner David Berry, is one of scale: The sheer magnitude of biological data that you can store on cloud technology is unprecedented. And that size, when leveraged properly, can allow you to ask questions and form insights that are similarly unprecedented.

It’s been less than a month since Lumen Bioscience announced a $16 million Series B to engineer spirulina — a nutrient-packed super food — for diseases like traveler’s diarrhea, norovirus and C. difficile colitis. And now, the biotech has pulled in another $4 million to do the same for Covid-19.

The approach is quite similar to other gastrointestinal targets the company is pursuing, co-founders and Brian Finrow and Jim Roberts said. The Seattle-based company is working on a camelid antibody cocktail to combat GI infection common among Covid-19 patients. In a study published in the American Journal of Gastroenterology, a majority of Covid-19 patients showed GI and respiratory symptoms, and 25% had only GI symptoms.

The FDA has been insisting for months that a Covid-19 vaccine had to be at least 50% effective – a measure of transparency meant to shore public trust in the agency and in a vaccine that had been brought forward at record speed and record political pressure. But now, with concerns of a Trump-driven authorization arriving before the election, the agency may be raising the bar.

The FDA is set to release new guidance that would raise safety and efficacy requirements for a vaccine EUA above earlier guidance and above the criteria used for convalescent plasma or hydroxychloroquine, The Washington Post reported. Experts say this significantly lowers the odds of an approval before the election on November 3, which Trump has promised despite vocal concerns from public health officials, and could help shore up public trust in the agency and any eventual vaccine.