
Shkreli wants out of jail to find coronavirus cure - ilamont
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-04-07/shkreli-coronavirus-treatment
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credit_guy
The coverage of this is quite unfair.

Shkreli was sentenced to 7 years of prison in 2018. So he should be able to
get out of prison in 2025. From the headline, you'd imagine he wants to
somehow not serve the remaining 5 years. In reality he's asking for a 3 month
"furlough" [1]:

"I am asking for a brief furlough (3 months) to assist in research work on
COVID-19"

I am not sure if "furlough" is even a legal term, but house arrest is a way to
serve your sentence in the US [2].

Edit: I skimmed through the paper [1]. Here's my summary:

* paper not peer-reviewed

* what was done: someone was able to provide Shkreli an HPC cluster with 512 CPU's. Shkreli did a "big data" exercise to see which compounds are promising, based on some criteria, which are presumably quite standard in pharma research

* main result: the most promising drug is clofazimine glucuronide: "we found clofazimine glucuronide to be one of the highest-scoring compounds across both screens"

* big red flag: the tables included in the paper do not actually support this statement. The compound is the highest scoring for the first screen, but did not make it in the top 20 in the second.

* worse red flag: the whole test was done for effectiveness against another coronavirus, not against the novel one that causes Covid-19.

All in all, the quality of the paper is quite dubious.

Shkreli's ask to be "furloughed" doesn't seem too scandalous to me though.
He's currently in a minimum security prison. House arrest is probably not that
different.

[1]
[https://prosperopharma.com/covid19.pdf](https://prosperopharma.com/covid19.pdf)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_arrest#United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_arrest#United_States)

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IXxXI
Shkreli wants to buy chloroquine stockpiles.

So he can raise the price 20,000%.

