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.”

An FDA advisory committee noted with concern a small safety database but unanimously endorsed a Horizon Therapeutics drug for a rare eye autoimmune disease that can blind patients: teprotumumab for thyroid eye disease (TED).

“It was a pretty easy vote,” said Erica Brittain, an NIH biostatistician and one of the 12 panelists on FDA’s Dermatologic and Ophthalmic Drugs Advisory Committee.

Timing is Everything
When we launched Octagon Therapeutics in late 2017, I was convinced that the time was right for a new antibiotic discovery venture. The company was founded on impressive academic pedigree and the management team had known each other for years. Our first program was based on a compelling approach to targeting central metabolism in the most dangerous bacterial pathogens. We had already shown a high level of efficacy in animal infection models and knew our drug was safe in humans.

Amid Shehnaaz Suliman’s lengthy resume it could be easy to miss her stint leading early-stage Alzheimer’s R&D at Genentech, where she oversaw a program for the ill-fated crenezumab and initiated one of the first prevention studies around the devastating neurodegenerative disease. But it is this experience that she — after thinking long and hard about her next career move over the past months — will be leaning heavily on as the first president and COO of Alector.

Biogen’s fierce focus on disorders of the brain has hit another roadblock.

On Friday, the US drugmaker — which recently resurrected its amyloid-targeting Alzheimer’s drug, aducanumab — said its anti-tau drug, gosuranemab, failed a mid-stage study in patients with progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), a rare brain disorder that results from deterioration of brain cells that control movement and thought.