KaloBios Fires Embattled Pharmaceutical Executive Martin Shkreli

After buying a 60-year-old anti-infective drug often used by AIDS patients earlier this year, Turing raised the price overnight to $750 a tablet from $13.50.

Shkreli resigned from the company’s board of directors and from its audit committee, KaloBios said in a statement.

KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, a faltering drug company whose shares skyrocketed last month after the reviled former hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli disclosed a huge stake, has fired Shkreli as CEO. The hacked tweets have since been removed, Shkreli regained control of @MartinShkreli on Monday.

KaloBios’ plan to get approval for a drug already used elsewhere in the world to treat a tropical ailment had attracted attention to the possible abuse of an FDA program.

Turing announced on Friday that it had appointed a new interim chief executive to replace Shkreli. Chase joined the KaloBios board when the investor group led by Shkreli took over KaloBios in mid-November.

Shkreli, 32, who is free on $5 million bail, maintains that he is innocent and will be vindicated. “‘Trying to find anything we could to stop him’ was the attitude of the government”, Shkreli told the [Wall Street] Journal in an interview, saying he was arrested because of a social experiment and teasing people over the Internet, and called the arrest unjust. Kalobios shares rose from less than a $1 to a high of almost $40 under his brief leadership, but its stocks have stopped trading in the wake of Shkreli’s legal drama.

Meanwhile, it emerged yesterday that a planned trial of KaloBios’ leukaemia drug KB003 has been suspended by the University of California at Davis and Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida “pending the outcome of the investigation of KaloBios’ CEO”, according to a Bloomberg report. He is accused of using money from his first pharmaceutical company, Retrophin, to pay off money-losing investors in his hedge funds.

Shkreli tweeted Saturday: “I am confident I will prevail”.

“At the same time, I am very excited about the opportunity to guide Turing Pharmaceuticals forward”, he added. Many are still viewable on Twitter under “martin shkreli hacked”.

Unfortunately for him, the federal government clearly took note of his astonishingly assholish ways and chose to take a closer look at his financial dealings, only to discover that there were enough grounds to take him in and charge him with securities fraud.