Mar­tin Shkre­li will have to find a new nick­name.

A fed­er­al judge banned the for­mer biotech CEO and “Phar­ma Bro” from the drug in­dus­try on Fri­day, or­der­ing him to pay near­ly $65 mil­lion in il­lic­it prof­its. Shkre­li was con­vict­ed of se­cu­ri­ties fraud in 2017 and is cur­rent­ly serv­ing a sev­en-year prison sen­tence, though he orig­i­nal­ly gained no­to­ri­ety for rais­ing the price of the an­tipar­a­sitic drug Dara­prim from $13.50 to $750 in 2015.

“The risk of a re­cur­rence here is re­al,” Judge Denise Cote wrote in a 135-page opin­ion. “Shkre­li has not ex­pressed re­morse or any aware­ness that his ac­tions vi­o­lat­ed the law. While he takes full re­spon­si­bil­i­ty in his di­rect tes­ti­mo­ny for the in­crease of Dara­prim’s price from $17.50 to $750 per pill, he de­nies re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for vir­tu­al­ly any­thing else.”

New York at­tor­ney gen­er­al Leti­tia James al­so chimed in, say­ing in a state­ment that “Amer­i­cans can rest easy be­cause Mar­tin Shkre­li is a phar­ma bro no more.”

The FTC and sev­en states — Cal­i­for­nia, New York, Illi­nois, North Car­oli­na, Ohio, Penn­syl­va­nia and Vir­ginia — brought the suit against Shkre­li in 2020, es­sen­tial­ly claim­ing he was run­ning a drug mo­nop­oly from prison. Shkre­li, reg­u­la­tors and states said, at­tempt­ed to pre­vent Dara­prim gener­ics from reach­ing the mar­ket by block­ing com­peti­tors’ ac­cess to a key in­gre­di­ent.

De­tails of the saga con­tin­ued trick­ling out in the two years since. Hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly brought at­ten­tion to him­self through his prison blogs and use of a con­tra­band cell phone, Shkre­li be­gan ac­tive­ly en­gag­ing in the an­ti­com­pet­i­tive scheme us­ing the prison’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tems, which were record­ed and mon­i­tored.

Op­pos­ing lawyers pounced, us­ing the calls against him in their ar­gu­ments — claim­ing at­tor­ney-client priv­i­lege did not ap­ply here — and push­ing for the life­time ban. Shkre­li’s lawyers, mean­while, as­sert­ed his sta­tus as a first-time of­fend­er meant he like­ly wouldn’t re­peat his il­lic­it ac­tiv­i­ties and sought a more le­nient 10-year in­dus­try re­stric­tion.

Ul­ti­mate­ly, the judge found Shkre­li’s ac­tions vi­o­lat­ed fed­er­al and state laws that pro­hib­it an­ti­com­pet­i­tive con­duct. Dara­prim gener­ics were de­layed mar­ket en­try by at least 18 months, Cote wrote, with Vy­era prof­it­ing $64.6 mil­lion from the scheme.

Fri­day’s rul­ing comes on the heels of an­oth­er court de­ci­sion against Shkre­li last month, in which Vy­era and its par­ent com­pa­ny, Phoenixus AG, were or­dered to pay more than $40 mil­lion for block­ing gener­ic Dara­prim ac­cess. Vy­era was re­quired to make Dara­prim avail­able to any po­ten­tial gener­ic com­peti­tor at list price and to pro­vide pri­or no­ti­fi­ca­tion of any planned phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal trans­ac­tion val­ued at $25 mil­lion or more.

Dara­prim had been the on­ly FDA-ap­proved drug to treat a po­ten­tial­ly life-threat­en­ing con­di­tion known as tox­o­plas­mo­sis. Im­muno­com­pro­mised in­di­vid­u­als and those with HIV are par­tic­u­lar­ly vul­ner­a­ble to the par­a­sitic dis­ease. Shkre­li’s 2015 move to spike the price by more than 4,000% be­came a flash­point in grow­ing crit­i­cism against in­dus­try-wide price-goug­ing.

As concerns related to uptake and distribution continue to linger, Switzerland is among the first countries that plans to destroy hundreds of thousands of expired and unused Covid-19 vaccine doses.

The European country said it plans to destroy more than 600,000 doses of Moderna’s Spikevax Covid-19 vaccine as the doses have reached their expiration date.

However, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that he’s in the process of throwing 30 million doses in the garbage, exclaiming, “We have a big demand problem.”

More than 500 stakeholders sent comments to the FTC on whether the commission should look further into pharma middlemen, known as PBMs, with many of the commenters calling for more federal oversight.

Similar to the critical open comment period in a deadlocked FTC session last February, pharmacies and pharmacy groups are continuing to call out the lack of transparency among the top 3 PBMs, which control about 80% of the market.

HHS on Thursday finalized its decision to withdraw a rule, proposed just before former President Donald Trump left office, that would’ve caused thousands of HHS and FDA regulations to automatically expire if they weren’t reviewed within two years, and every 10 years thereafter.

The decision follows the filing of a lawsuit last March, in which several nonprofits alleged that the outgoing administration planted “a ticking timebomb” for HHS, essentially forcing it to devote an enormous amount of resources to the unprecedented and infeasible task of reviewing thousands of regulations regularly.

At the end of January, the European Medicines Agency officially launched its new clinical trials info system (CTIS), although the migration to the new platform has only really just begun, and sponsors have until the end of January 2023 before all initial trial applications must be submitted through CTIS.

Overall, 56 clinical trial applications have been submitted in CTIS during the first 3 months since the launch of the system on Jan. 31, according to new data posted by the EMA. By comparison, about 4,000 new trials are authorized each year across Europe.

The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS set a lofty goal back in 2019 to end the HIV epidemic by 2030. But according to the World Health Organization, infection rates are not falling rapidly enough to meet that target.

GSK’s ViiV Healthcare thinks it can help change that.

On Friday, ViiV announced that it’s in talks with the UN-backed Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) for patent rights to its cabotegravir long-acting HIV injectable for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in low- and middle-income countries.