A Flori­da man who fal­si­fied med­ical records in con­nec­tion to clin­i­cal tri­als was sen­tenced to 30 months in prison in fed­er­al court Thurs­day.

Daniel Teje­da, 35, of Clewis­ton, was al­so or­dered to pay $2.1 mil­lion in resti­tu­tion. Teje­da was a project man­ag­er and study man­ag­er for the CRO Tel­lus Clin­i­cal Re­search, and made it ap­pear that sub­jects were par­tic­i­pat­ing in tri­als when they weren’t. Two oth­er re­search work­ers from Flori­da were sen­tenced in the same case in Au­gust for 46 and 30 months, re­spec­tive­ly.

Teje­da was sen­tenced by fed­er­al judge Robert Sco­la of the South­ern Dis­trict of Flori­da.

The tri­als were to eval­u­ate a drug for ir­ri­ta­ble bow­el syn­drome, opi­oid de­pen­den­cy and di­a­bet­ic nephropa­thy. In the past, Tel­lus has worked with gi­ants such as Pfiz­er, Gilead and Take­da. Work on some of those tri­als came in­to ques­tion in the past, in­clud­ing tri­als on opi­oid de­pen­den­cy — spon­sored by Brae­burn Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals — and di­a­betes, run by Gilead. Last March, four more em­ploy­ees, in­clud­ing the own­er, were charged with con­spir­a­cy to com­mit mail and wire fraud and mon­ey laun­der­ing charges.

“Clin­i­cal tri­als help en­sure that new drugs are safe and ef­fec­tive for the pub­lic,” act­ing as­sis­tant at­tor­ney gen­er­al Bri­an Boyn­ton said in a state­ment. “Fal­si­fy­ing clin­i­cal tri­al da­ta un­der­mines a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of the drug ap­proval process. The De­part­ment of Jus­tice will con­tin­ue to work with our part­ners at the FDA to in­ves­ti­gate and pros­e­cute any­one who puts per­son­al prof­it over pub­lic health by fal­si­fy­ing clin­i­cal tri­al da­ta.”

The tri­als in ques­tion were be­tween Feb­ru­ary 2014 to Ju­ly 2016. The em­ploy­ees charged know­ing­ly en­rolled can­di­dates who did not meet the el­i­gi­bil­i­ty cri­te­ria, fal­si­fied lab re­sults, fal­si­fied med­ical records and said that the pa­tients were tak­ing the drugs when they weren’t.

The sen­tence is much more for­giv­ing than the max­i­mum penal­ty of 20 years in prison.

It was great getting back to a live ESMO conference/webinar in Paris followed by a live pop-up event for the Endpoints 11 in Boston. We’re staying on the road in October with our return for a live/streaming EUBIO22 in London.

Silicon Valley Bank’s Nooman Haque and I are once again jumping back into the thick of it with a slate of virtual and live events on October 12. I’ll get the ball rolling with a virtual fireside chat with Novo Nordisk R&D chief Marcus Schindler, covering their pipeline plans and BD work.

Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel made clear on the last quarterly call that “now is not the time to slow down.” On Thursday, he made a bit more room in the cockpit.

The company unveiled a new executive role on Thursday, promoting former chief technical operations and quality officer Juan Andres to president of strategic partnerships and enterprise expansion, and poaching a former Novartis exec to take his place.

The US Senate passed via unanimous consent on Thursday afternoon a bipartisan bill that would alter a federal mandate for animal testing on new drugs, but stops short of removing animal testing entirely.

Touted as a much-needed modernization of FDA’s rules, co-sponsor Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) have said the bill will stop lots of needless suffering of animals.

Today the Senate unanimously passed my bipartisan FDA Modernization Act 2.0 to end animal testing mandates! This is an important step toward innovation and ending the needless suffering and death of animal test subjects. pic.twitter.com/vGpCCdpuOf

The European Medicines Agency said Thursday that it’s launching a new pilot program to help academic and other nonprofit researchers developing advanced therapy medicinal products, which includes cell and gene therapies.

Academics have proven to be enormously useful in feeding new products, like chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapies first developed by Memorial Sloan Kettering, and ushered to the market by biopharma companies. Jean Bennett, formerly with the University of Pennsylvania, also saw her research lead to the approval of gene therapy Luxturna, which Roche now owns.

Gilead is mounting its counterfeit drug lawsuit, naming two “kingpins” and a complex network of conspirators who allegedly sold imitation bottles of its HIV meds, some of which ended up in US pharmacies.

The pharma giant on Wednesday provided an update on what it called a “large-scale, sophisticated counterfeiting conspiracy,” accusing two new defendants of “leading and orchestrating” a scheme to sell hundreds of millions of dollars in illegitimate drugs posing as meds such as Biktarvy and Descovy.