An inmate in Georgia has been sentenced to seven additional years in prison for running a $3 million fraud scheme to steal and then resell heavy equipment from behind bars — by posing as an AbbVie employee using a contraband cell phone.
While serving a 20-year sentence for racketeering and assaulting a police officer, Damon Thomas Young was found to have given himself the fake identity of a purchasing officer with AbbVie named Morgan Sylvia and, beginning in 2019, placed orders for more than $2.8 million worth of heavy construction equipment.
On the phone, he told vendors that AbbVie was building a new facility in Ranger, GA — where he and his family lived — and needed wheel loaders, skid steer loaders, an excavator, a horizontal grinder and dump trucks.
The Department of Justice spells out the next steps of his elaborate plot:
Young communicated with the equipment dealers by phone, text, and email from prison. He fraudulently completed credit applications, purchase orders, sales contracts, and insurance documents and emailed them to the dealers as part of the scheme. He also emailed a fraudulent AbbVie corporate resolution document, purportedly signed by actual corporate officers of the company, but in truth he had forged the signatures on the document.
Although most of the dealers caught it before shipment, Young managed to get four pieces of equipment with a collective value of $500,000 shipped to Ranger, according to the Department of Justice. He then put them up for sale on Craigslist, earning enough to purchase two Chevrolet work trucks.
On top of his new federal sentence for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, Young, 39, has been ordered to pay $30,000 in restitution to the online purchaser of the stolen equipment.
While oncology researchers have long pursued the potential of cellular immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer, it was unclear whether these therapies would ever reach patients due to the complexity of manufacturing and costs of development. Fortunately, the recent successful development and regulatory approval of chimeric antigen receptor-engineered T (CAR-T) cells have demonstrated the significant benefit of these therapies to patients.
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Wednesday rejected Moderna’s attempt to overturn key patents related to the delivery vehicle for its Covid-19 vaccine after the biotech sought to preempt a potentially risky infringement lawsuit.
For years, Moderna has been battling a tiny Pennsylvania biotech known as Arbutus over patents for a technology required to deliver its mRNA drugs and vaccines, known as lipid nanoparticles or LNP. Moderna is concerned there’s a substantial risk that Arbutus will assert the ‘069 patent in an infringement suit targeting Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine, particularly as Arbutus has boasted of its patent protection and refused to grant a covenant not to sue Moderna.
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Novartis is plopping down $150 million in cash to pick up an experimental Parkinson’s drug and grab an option to another, a move that puts it on an increasingly popular path in the field’s search for disease-modifying therapies.
Belgium’s UCB is its partner of choice, supplying two small molecule alpha-synuclein misfolding inhibitors in a deal that can add up to nearly $1.5 billion.
Out of the pair, UCB0599 is already in Phase II trials, making Novartis confident enough to pull the trigger on co-development and commercialization, including to foot half of the R&D bill. The pharma giant will make a decision on UCB7853 once UCB wraps the ongoing Phase I program.
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Amgen will soon be the 10th biopharma company to pull back on offering drug discounts to contract pharmacies of safety-net hospitals under a federal program. Like its peers, Amgen argues that the growth of these contract pharmacies has ballooned in recent years and needs to be reigned in.
Beginning Jan. 3, 2022, Amgen’s policy will only allow 340B covered hospitals to designate a single pharmacy location, with the exception of federal grantees and contract pharmacies wholly owned by a 340B hospital, or that have common ownership with a health system.
John Maraganore (Scott Eisen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
After almost two decades of primarily being known as Alnylam’s CEO, John Maraganore is getting a new, prominent title.
Maraganore is among a slate of new venture partners at ARCH Venture, joining alongside ex-FDA official Luciana Borio, Jake Bauer (previously at MyoKardia), Axel Bouchon (former head of Leaps by Bayer) and Sabah Oney (of Alector fame).
The move was hardly surprising. Maraganore has made it clear that his retirement, which is scheduled for the end of the year, signaled a shift into a new phase of his career where, instead of hands-on parenting, he wanted to be like a ‘grandfather’ to the next generation of biotech startups, imparting hard-earned wisdom about the treacherous journey from the lab to market — one he personally shepherded Alnylam and its RNAi science through.
Sonny Hsiao, Acepodia CEO
Acepodia chairman and co-founder Patrick Yang called cancer ‘the longest war America (has) ever fought.’ So when he met Sonny Hsiao in 2016 and saw his ‘clever, very simple, elegant’ approach to battling tumor cells, he was all in.
Four years and some very early positive results later, Yang and Hsiao have racked up another $109 million from investors to see their ‘antibody-cell conjugates’ through the clinic. And while Yang says this isn’t a crossover round, he admitted that the company is ‘watching the capital climate’ and could possibly file for an IPO next year.
Philip Dormitzer, new GSK global head of vaccines R&D
GlaxoSmithKline has appointed Philip Dormitzer, formerly chief scientific officer of Pfizer’s viral vaccines unit, as its newest global head of vaccines R&D, looking to leverage one of the leading minds behind Pfizer and BioNTech’s RNA collaboration that led to Covid-19 jab Comirnaty, the British drug giant said Tuesday.
Dormitzer had been with Pfizer for a little more than six years, joining up after a seven-year stint with Novartis, where he reached the role of US head of research and head of global virology for the company’s vaccines and diagnostics unit.
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When GlaxoSmithKline trumpeted its return to neuroscience with a $700 million upfront deal with Alector this summer, it touted its early investments in functional genomics as a key guidepost for that deal. Now, the drug giant has partnered up with Oxford to hopefully add jet fuel to its hunt for breakthroughs in the brain.
GSK and Oxford have kickstarted a five-year collaboration aimed at spurring R&D breakthroughs across a range of hard-to-treat diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s through the use of genomic testing and machine learning, the partners said Wednesday.
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Fyodor Urnov (L) and Charlie Gersbach
A little under 20 years ago, Charlie Gersbach decided he needed to try something else.
The young Georgia Tech grad student started out his career hoping to help patients regenerate injured tissues, but he found pretty much nothing worked. None of the chemical or mechanical or even electric interventions then in vogue yielded much success.
So he turned his attention to an emerging approach: changing the epigenome, or the systems of tags and folds on DNA that govern which genes are expressed and how. And he stuck to it, even as many scientists, enticed by CRISPR and other advances, flocked to genome editing.
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