Notorious "pharma bro" Martin Shkreli in a court filing Wednesday asked to be released from prison for the remainder of his seven-year criminal sentence so that he can both work on developing a coronavirus treatment and avoid contracting a potentially fatal case of Covid-19 himself.

Shkreli, who has about 41 months remaining on that sentence for securities fraud, is requesting that a judge direct his release into home confinement with a person described as his fiance "at her apartment" in Manhattan, according to the new filing in Brooklyn federal court.

Shkreli had said in a scientific paper online posted two weeks ago that he wanted just a three-month-long furlough from prison to do his coronavirus work.

But Shkreli's lawyers in their filing Wednesday urged a judge to give the fallen pharmaceuticals executive "compassionate release" for the rest of his sentence on an emergency basis.

The filing notes that the warden of Shkeli's prison, the Allenwood, Penn., low-security federal facility, last week denied his petition to that warden for compassionate release under critieria established by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

The warden had cited the fact that Shkreli was considered at "low" risk of committing crimes when released, as determined by a so-called PATTERN assessment tool, when the criteria requires a "minimum" risk of reoffending.

But attorneys for Shkreli, who has exhausted appeals of his conviction, warned in their filing that he has a "susceptibility to infection [from the coronavirus] due to allergies and asthma."

"It is likely that he will soon be exposed to the virus and potentially become critically ill or die," their filing said.

Lawyers said that if the 37-year-old was freed he could be directed "to serve the remainder of his prison sentence in home confinement with electronic monitoring and with permission to work on his research from home, or, with permission of probation, to report to a specific local workplace to perform research on a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) treatment."