Mar­tin Shkre­li didn’t just blog, read up on drug de­vel­op­ment news and run his biotech busi­ness with a con­tra­band cell phone in prison. Ac­cord­ing to the FTC, he was al­so co­or­di­nat­ing the an­ti­com­pet­i­tive scheme to shield Dara­prim — the drug at the cen­ter of a price-goug­ing con­tro­ver­sy that earned him the “Phar­ma Bro” nick­name — from gener­ic ri­vals.

Back in Jan­u­ary the FTC, to­geth­er with New York’s at­tor­ney gen­er­al, launched a fed­er­al law­suit against Shkre­li, who’s now serv­ing a 7-year sen­tence for de­fraud­ing in­vestors in his hedge fund, al­leg­ing that he ef­fec­tive­ly cre­at­ed a drug mo­nop­oly. While Shkre­li’s no­to­ri­ous move to raise the per tablet price of Dara­prim from $17.50 to $750 was per­fect­ly le­gal, the tac­tics he al­leged­ly de­ployed to box out com­peti­tors weren’t.

“Dur­ing our pre-com­plaint in­ves­ti­ga­tion, the FTC learned that Mr. Shkre­li was com­mu­ni­cat­ing from prison about rel­e­vant mat­ters,” reads a let­ter to Judge Denise Cote.

Specif­i­cal­ly, they found records of his con­ver­sa­tions with ex­ec­u­tives of Vy­era — for­mer­ly Tur­ing and now Phoenixus — in­clud­ing co-de­fen­dant Kevin Mul­leady, which con­tained “in­for­ma­tion rel­e­vant to this case, in­clud­ing about Mr. Shkre­li’s ef­forts from prison to sup­port Vy­era’s scheme to pre­vent gener­ic com­pe­ti­tion to Dara­prim.” There are al­so ma­te­ri­als on his com­mu­ni­ca­tion with at­tor­neys.

The agency wants the court to rule that the com­mu­ni­ca­tions it ob­tained from the Fed­er­al Bu­reau of Pris­ons are not priv­i­leged — and there­fore fair game for the en­su­ing le­gal bat­tle.

Un­like the records on his con­tra­band cell phone, the FTC ar­gues, these calls and emails hap­pened on the prison’s TRU­FONE and TRULINCS sys­tems, which Shkre­li knew could be mon­i­tored and record­ed. Nei­ther at­tor­ney-client priv­i­lege nor the work prod­uct doc­trine should ap­ply here, it writes.

It’s un­clear how much Dara­prim’s pric­ing will be af­fect­ed. A month af­ter the FTC and the New York AG filed their law­suit ask­ing, among oth­er things, to re­store com­pet­i­tive con­di­tions and halt any on­go­ing an­ti-com­pet­i­tive con­duct, the FDA ap­proved the first gener­ic for Dara­prim. Al­though the gener­ic mak­er hasn’t dis­closed how much it’s charg­ing for its copy­cat drug, it was enough to kick Dara­prim off the list of the top 20 most ex­pen­sive treat­ments in the US.

But for Shkre­li and Mul­leady, los­ing the law­suit could mean be­ing barred from the phar­ma in­dus­try in the fu­ture in ad­di­tion to mon­e­tary re­lief.

The prospect could be es­pe­cial­ly tough for Shkre­li, who sought — but was de­nied — a 3-month fur­lough to re­search Covid-19 cures af­ter post­ing a pa­per de­scrib­ing a drug screen and propos­ing RdRp in­hibitors as po­ten­tial treat­ments.

David Livingston, the Dana-Farber/Harvard Med scientist who helped shine a light on some of the key molecular drivers of breast and ovarian cancer, died unexpectedly last Sunday.

One of the senior leaders at Dana-Farber during his nearly half century of work there, Livingston was credited with shedding light on the genes that regulate cell growth, with insights into inherited BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations that helped lay the scientific foundation for targeted therapies and earlier detection that have transformed the field.

Steve Holtzman was awoken by a 1 a.m. call from a doctor at Duke University asking if he could put some pigs on a plane and fly them from Ohio to North Carolina that day. A motorcyclist had gotten into a horrific crash, the doctor explained. He believed the pigs’ livers, sutured onto the patient’s skin like an external filter, might be able to tide the young man over until a donor liver became available.