Ar­cus Bio­sciences chief med­ical of­fi­cer Kar­tik Kr­ish­nan re­cent­ly left the biotech to take an­oth­er op­por­tu­ni­ty else­where, a com­pa­ny spokesper­son con­firmed to End­points News.

The com­pa­ny has be­gun a search process for his re­place­ment. Kr­ish­nan told End­points he left the start­up last month af­ter see­ing the clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment team grow from three MDs to about 150 peo­ple hop­ping on clin­i­cal op­er­a­tions group meet­ings.

“I had put peo­ple in place in lead­er­ship roles, in­clud­ing in the de­vel­op­ment func­tion, that I felt the shop would be well tak­en care of if there were no me there,” he said. He starts his next job, an­oth­er CMO role at a small­er on­col­o­gy-fo­cused biotech, next month. “I’ve nev­er tak­en a month off,” he added.

The move comes less than a year af­ter Kr­ish­nan was el­e­vat­ed to the head of the biotech’s clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment op­er­a­tions, which in­cludes a mul­ti-tri­al TIG­IT as­set, a drug that is like­ly to come un­der in­creased pres­sure and scru­ti­nized eyes af­ter Roche’s prized TIG­IT failed a clin­i­cal tri­al ear­li­er this week.

His job move­ment “didn’t have any­thing to do with the da­ta,” Kr­ish­nan said, not­ing he was “sur­prised” by the Roche da­ta and hadn’t seen it un­til every­body else did.

Kr­ish­nan as­sumed the post in Ju­ly 2021 from Bill Gross­man, who left to be­come Gilead’s SVP of on­col­o­gy clin­i­cal re­search. The two worked to­geth­er close­ly fol­low­ing the tran­si­tion, giv­en their em­ploy­ers’ part­ner­ship on the TIG­IT as­set, which is in mul­ti­ple clin­i­cal tri­als.

“How­ev­er, giv­en the strongest sig­nal of clin­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ty was from [Roche’s] tiragolum­ab (Fc-com­pe­tent TIG­IT), we need to see sup­port­ive clin­i­cal da­ta be­fore as­sum­ing any oth­er com­pa­ny has a bet­ter mol­e­cule or strat­e­gy than Roche. We ex­pect the first such da­ta will be the 2H22 read­out of ARC-7 from Ar­cus / Gilead,” SVB Se­cu­ri­ties an­a­lysts wrote in a note this week af­ter Roche’s TIG­IT as­set failed a Phase III study in pa­tients with non-small cell lung can­cer.

Ar­cus’ ARC-7 study is al­so a tri­al in NSCLC. The biotech’s stock $RCUS slid about $7 on Wednes­day af­ter Roche re­leased its TIG­IT da­ta ear­ly that morn­ing.

Kr­ish­nan joined Hay­ward, CA-based Ar­cus in 2019 as SVP of clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment. Pri­or to Ar­cus, he was in var­i­ous med­ical di­rec­tor roles at Aster Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, Genen­tech, FivePrime Ther­a­peu­tics, Bio­Marin Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and Am­gen over the past decade.

NIAID director Anthony Fauci gained hero status amid the pandemic, earning Americans’ trust and even Time magazine’s Guardian of the Year title. But he and other federal health officials have also faced intense threats, according to charges brought by the US Department of Justice.

A West Virginia man is facing up to 10 years in prison after threatening Fauci, former NIH director Francis Collins, and HHS assistant secretary for health Rachel Levine via email, the DOJ said on Monday. Thomas Patrick Connally, Jr., pleaded guilty on Monday to using an anonymous email address to threaten the officials for performing their official duties, including discussing Covid-19 testing and prevention.

Vanda Pharmaceuticals is making a name for itself, at least in terms of suing the FDA.

The DC-headquartered firm on Monday filed its latest suit against the agency, with the company raising concerns over the FDA’s failure to grant a fast track designation for Vanda’s potential chronic digestive disorder drug tradipitant, which is a neurokinin 1 receptor antagonist.

Specifically, Vanda said FDA’s “essential point” in its one-page denial letter on the designation pointed to “the lack of necessary safety data,” which was “inconsistent with the criteria for … Fast Track designation.”

A pivot into neoantigen immunotherapies was not enough to save Genocea Biosciences after all.

The 16-year-old biotech said it would be closing down and laying off all remaining employees “except those deemed necessary to complete an orderly wind down” of operations. It has also delivered a formal notice to Nasdaq, notifying the stock exchange of its intent to delist voluntarily.

The move comes a month after Genocea laid off 75% of its workforce and revealed it’s looking for strategic alternatives, such as a sale, merger or reverse merger. At the end of 2021, it had 74 employees.