Talk:Star Scientific

unsourced
moving here per WP:PRESERVE - unsourced

Williams, who lived in Virginia, donated over $120,000 to McDonnell's political action committee. Williams also allowed McDonnell and his family access to his (Williams') lake house home and other assets including his AstonMartin sports car.

During the subsequent legal case against McDonnell, Williams had immunity against criminal prosecution. The Company, (and the Directors) were however, named in a class action lawsuit which although it did not focus on the activities of Williams and McDonnell directly, did focus on other aspects of Williams' promotion of Anatabloc particularly its claims about the role of Johns Hopkins professors in some of its studies with Anatabloc. The class action suit and a Derivative case were settled at considerable expense to the Company. Williams' legal costs in the McDonnell case were also paid for by the Company, as were those of his secretary. The high legal costs generated by Williams as CEO of Star Scientific were subsequently borne by Rock Creek Pharmaceuticals when Williams and the Star Scientific board resigned.

-- Jytdog (talk) 21:30, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

some history
did some work on this and am just stashing it here

The roots of Star Scientific go back to a company called Eye Technology Inc. founded in June 1985 and Star Tobacco Corporation in Petersburg, Virginia, a manufacturer of tobacco products founded in 1990. Both shared a director, Samuel P. Sears, Jr.

Eye Technology Inc was a publicly-traded company focused on intraocular lenses that ran into financial difficulties in the mid-1990s.

In 1990 shortly after Star was formed, Francis O'Donnell, Jr., M.D., who had been an investor with Jonnie R. Williams in a business to cure tobacco in a way that resulted in less toxic tobacco, sold assets of that business (which had gone bankrupt) to Star, and in 1994 Williams joined Star, and Star began conducting R&D on less harmful tobacco and on tobacco cessation products that sameyear. Also in 1994, Star began selling its own branded products and by then had had filed an Investigational New Drug (IND) application with the FDA for a nicotine gum made from extracts of less-toxic tobacco for use in smoking cessation.

In January 1998 Star entered into a license agreement with Regent Court Technologies, a partnership between Williams and O'Donnell, that provided Star with exclusive rights to patents owned by Regent related to "methods to cure tobacco so as to substantially prevent the formation of tobacco-specific nitrosamines in cured tobacco."

In February 1998 the then-named Star Tobacco & Pharmaceuticals, Inc. acquired all the assets of Eye Technology and its public listing; by the end of that year the name of the company was changed to Star Scientific Inc and all the assets of Eye Technology Inc. had been sold off.

By 1999 the company had named the process it had licensed as the "StarCure process"; in that year it claimed that it treated around 3.5 million pounds of tobacco in 1999, and had incorporated their treated tobacco into their four brands of discount cigarettes: Sport, Mainstreet, Vegas, and G-smoke (formerly Gunsmoke). As of April 1999, Robert J. DeLorenzo was the CEO and Williams was Chief Operating Officer, Executive Vice President and Director; Williams was the CEO as of March 2000 and DeLorenzo was chairman.

In 2003 it sold off its four low-toxin cigarette brands to North Atlantic Trading Company for $80 million in cash.

The company began developing anatabine and started marketing two products containing it, Antabloc and CigRx, as dietary supplements; it started marketing CigRx in August 2010 and Anatabloc on August 2011. The company also filed an IND for anatabine which was accepted by the FDA in June 2012. In December 2013 the FDA sent a warning letter to Star, telling Star that it had not demonstrated to the FDA that anatabine was safe enough to market as a dietary supplement before they had started marketing it, and that the Antabloc and CigRx were both considered to be adulterated by the FDA.

-- Jytdog (talk) 06:07, 17 September 2016 (UTC)