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.”

Four years ago, when Arena CEO Amit Munshi cut its ties to a troubled weight drug and doubled down on the pipeline, a cannabinoid receptor 2 agonist figured prominently in the biotech’s future. On Tuesday evening, however, Munshi’s high hopes for the drug took a nasty hit after it failed a Phase IIb study for patients with irritable bowel syndrome pain.

Put through a randomized pace with 273 patients, researchers said it flat failed the primary endpoint among the large group with abdominal pain. But they quickly went on to highlight subgroup data, always a tricky and controversial ploy, where they spotlighted a positive p value for patients with moderate to severe pain who received the high dose of the drug — one of 3 provided in the study.

As the superbug crisis heats up around the world, Scynexis says it has new data from two interim analyses that prove its antifungal has the potential to treat a broad range of infections.

“The need for new anti-infectives capable of fighting the most resistant pathogens has never been more urgent as we confront the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic,” CEO Marco Taglietti said in a statement.

When Takeda spun out a pipeline of experimental psychiatry drugs to Neurocrine in a $2 billion deal amid a post-merger shakeout, R&D chief Andy Plump described the therapies as “very interesting but still difficult.”

On Tuesday, we got some idea of how difficult.

San Diego-based Neurocrine revealed that one of the three spotlight clinical programs they’d acquired failed the primary endpoint in a Phase II trial for schizophrenia, registering a negative outcome on the change from baseline in the positive and negative syndrome scale/negative symptom factor score (PANSS NSFS).

Merck took a big gamble when it opted to jump into the Covid-19 vaccine race late, and made an equally momentous decision to back out in late January. Now, looking to chip in on the effort, Merck reportedly agreed to team up with one of the companies that has already crossed the finish line.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday is expected to announce a partnership between drugmakers Merck and Johnson & Johnson to jointly produce J&J’s recombinant protein Covid-19 vaccine that received the FDA’s emergency use authorization Saturday, the Washington Post reported.