A Canton, Massachusetts, man was arrested at Boston’s Logan International Airport in connection with the ongoing federal criminal investigation of New England Compounding Center (NECC).
Glenn Adam Chin, 46, was attempting to board a plane to Hong Kong when he was arrested by federal authorities on one count of mail fraud.
He is scheduled to appear before Chief Magistrate Judge Jennifer C. Boal in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts later today.
The maximum sentence under the statute is 20 years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release and a $250,000 fine.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Civil Division’s Consumer Protection Branch have conducted an active ongoing criminal investigation of NECC since the nationwide fungal meningitis outbreak began in the fall of 2012.
Following the outbreak, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported that 751 patients across the country were diagnosed with a fungal infection after receiving injections of preservative-free methylprednisolone acetate, or MPA, compounded at NECC.
The CDC reported that of those 751 patients, 64 died.
Chin was a supervising pharmacist at NECC who was involved in compounding the contaminated MPA that caused the outbreak.
The criminal complaint charges Chin with participating in a scheme to fraudulently cause one lot of MPA to be labeled as injectable, meaning that it was sterile and fit for human use, and shipped to one of NECC’s customers, Michigan Pain Specialists.
As alleged in the affidavit, after receiving the MPA from NECC, doctors at Michigan Pain Specialists injected the drug into their patients believing it to be injectable as labeled.
As a result, 217 of those patients contracted fungal meningitis, and 15 of those patients died.
Although the criminal investigation of Chin and others is ongoing, the U.S. Attorney’s Office charged and arrested Chin today after federal authorities learned that he was planning to leave the country on an international flight that was scheduled to depart this morning.