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.”

Biotech is one of the smartest, best educated industries on the planet. PhDs abound. We’ve had a long enough track record to see a new generation of savvy, experienced execs coming together to run startups.

And in these times, they are being tested as never before.

Biotech is going through quite a rough patch right now. For 2 years, practically anyone with a decent resume and some half-baked ideas on biotech could start a company and get it funded. The pandemic made it easy in many ways to pull off an IPO, with traditional road shows shut down in exchange for a series of quick Zoom meetings. Generalist investors flocked as the numbers raised soared into the stratosphere.

It looks like Warren Buffett is sticking to ice cream and railroads for the moment.

The billionaire CEO of Berkshire Hathaway backed out of two major holdings in the pharma industry, Forexlive first reported, including a $410 million investment in AbbVie and a $324.4 million stake in Bristol Myers Squibb.

The move comes after Berkshire abandoned its Teva shares just last quarter, Bloomberg reported.

Nearly a year ago, more than 200 workers at Novartis’ Grimsby, UK, facility were able to hang on to their jobs after the pharma closed a Switzerland site as a part of its workforce restructuring plan. Now, it looks like those employees’ time is up, as the site has been sold, Grimsby Telegraph reported today.

The manufacturing site has been sold to Humber Industrials, a subsidiary of International Process Plants. None of the current staff members will be working with the new owners, however.

Usually reserved for making decisions on drug applications or enforcing what Congress stipulates, the FDA is now dipping its toe into the wild world of congressional politics as it attempts to fix a major court decision that could have a chilling effect on rare disease R&D.

The case in question from last October saw a US appeals court overturn a prior FDA court win, saying that the agency never should’ve approved a rare disease drug because a previously approved but more expensive drug with the same active ingredient has orphan drug exclusivity barring such an approval.