What happened to Alexion’s ‘tone at the top’ team?

Last we heard from David Hallal and Vikas Sinha, they were handing in their resignations at Alexion Pharmaceuticals, as the company dealt with a scandal over its sales practices that ended with a self-administered rebuke of the “tone at the top.”

Now, as STAT’s Kate Sheridan reports, the two are back with a secretive startup called ElevateBio. The plan is to produce cell and gene therapies for a host of diseases including cancer, according to a slide deck obtained by STAT.

Despite being in the earliest stages of corporate life — ElevateBio does not yet have a website — the company has already engendered some controversy. The advocacy group Knowledge Ecology International has spoken out against ElevateBio’s efforts to license a CAR-T technology from the National Cancer Institute, arguing that private firms shouldn’t get exclusive rights to publicly funded research.

Read more (and see the slide deck).