Post-con­spir­a­cy claims, Arc­turus los­es an­oth­er ex­ec­u­tive amid board putsch; Gates Foun­da­tion hands $6.5M to No­var­tis for in­fec­tious di­ar­rhea treat­ment

→ Lit­tle Arc­turus $ARCT is go­ing through a dra­mat­ic shake­up this month. Short­ly af­ter news that its founder and CEO Joseph Payne was boot­ed from the com­pa­ny (with board mem­bers al­leged­ly con­spir­ing on his ouster), Arc­turus is now los­ing an­oth­er top ex­ec­u­tive. The com­pa­ny’s chief sci­en­tif­ic of­fi­cer and chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer Pad Chivuku­la is step­ping down, the com­pa­ny said in a state­ment. That’s in­ter­est­ing, con­sid­er­ing Payne re­cent­ly not­ed that both he and Chivuku­la had been left out of par­tic­i­pa­tion in board dis­cus­sions and votes. Chivuku­la will stay on as sci­en­tif­ic ad­vi­sor to Arc­turus, the com­pa­ny said. The news comes in con­junc­tion with a new state­ment filed with the SEC not­ing that Payne, the ex-CEO, is de­mand­ing an “ex­tra­or­di­nary meet­ing” of the board to vote on an ouster of his own de­sign. In the let­ter, he calls for the boot to four com­pa­ny di­rec­tors — Stu­art Collinson, Craig Wil­lett, Daniel Gef­fken, and David Shapiro — who he says en­gaged in an in­trigue that vi­o­lat­ed the rules es­tab­lished by the Is­raeli laws that gov­ern its op­er­a­tions. Payne is sug­gest­ing four new di­rec­tors take their place, in­clud­ing some of the biggest names in San Diego biotech: Mag­da Mar­quet, Pe­ter Far­rell, An­drew Sas­sine, and James Bar­low. Mar­quet, founder and co-chair of Althea Tech­nolo­gies, is a well-known in­dus­try ex­ec­u­tive who’s a bit of a leg­end in San Diego. And Far­rell, is the founder and for­mer long-term CEO and cur­rent chair­man of ResMed, one of the largest med­ical de­vice com­pa­nies in San Diego.

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