HIGHER EDUCATION
Wentworth’s first female president is stepping down
Wentworth Institute of Technology’s first female president, Zorica Pantic (left), says she will retire in 2019 after 14 years on the job. Pantic, an engineer by training, has led the Fenway university’s expansion and is credited with helping expand the former commuter school by increasing the number of undergraduate programs and offering graduate degrees. Pantic has “overseen a long period of financial stability, which has enabled our reinvestment in key strategic initiatives and strengthened the school’s academic reputation as a leader in engineering, design, management, and sciences education,’’ said P. Michael Masterson, chairman of Wentworth’s board of trustees. Pantic’s tenure as Wentworth’s president, which began in 2005, has lasted twice as long as the average top university administrator. “It’s the right time to move on,’’ she said of her leadership of the 4,000-student campus. “I achieved what I was hired to do.’’ Under her leadership, Wentworth invested more than $300 million in facility renovations and expansions, including dormitories and a new $55 million engineering, innovation, and science building, set to open next year. Wentworth has added nine new undergraduate programs, mostly in engineering, and graduate degrees in subjects such as architecture, civil engineering, construction management, and applied computer science. — DEIRDRE FERNANDES
BIOTECHNOLOGY
Startup gains more clients for ‘organ on a chip’ system
A Boston biotechnology startup that uses plastic chips to simulate human organs to test medicines outside of the body said Tuesday that two more pharmaceutical giants and a major California teaching hospital plan to use its technology to develop drugs. Emulate Inc., which makes so-called organ-on-a-chip systems to test whether drugs are safe and effective, announced partnerships with Japan-based Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., Swiss-based F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, of Los Angeles. Emulate already had partnerships with the giant drug makers Johnson & Johnson and Merck, according to company officials. Emulate was founded in 2014 and bankrolled with $57 million in venture capital. Financial terms of the partnerships with Takeda, Roche, and Cedars-Sinai were not disclosed. But the announcement signals growing interest in the technology of the privately held Boston company. “We are making very fast progress,’’ said Geraldine A. Hamilton, president and chief scientific officer of Emulate. “We’re addressing this huge need in the pharmaceutical industry to have more human elements to predict both safety and efficacy.’’ The plastic chips, about the size of a computer thumb drive, are designed to hold human cells and blood so scientists can test medicines on tissues that are unique to different organs. Takeda wants to use the chips to develop medicines to treat gastrointestinal diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease. Separate chips would simulate different organs in the gastrointestinal tract, such as the colon. — JONATHAN SALTZMAN
MARIJUANA INDUSTRY
State-run bank for recreational pot companies urged
Massachusetts should consider creating a state-run bank to serve recreational marijuana companies, the state’s top cannabis official suggested Wednesday, warning that an all-cash industry would create security risks and regulatory headaches. With recreational pot sales scheduled to begin in July, Cannabis Control Commission chairman Steve Hoffman said no local banks or credit unions have committed to providing financial services to recreational marijuana shops and other licensed cannabis operations, wary they will run afoul of federal restrictions. “There’s a high degree of urgency, so it’s something we need to start talking about,’’ Hoffman said in an interview. “Unfortunately, it’s a real possibility’’ that the recreational industry won’t have access to any banking services, he said. Without banks, marijuana businesses would have to deal exclusively in cash — for sales to customers and between retailers and suppliers, to meet payroll, and make tax payments to the state. Storing and handling potentially tens of thousands of dollars could invite robberies, law enforcement officials warned, and complicate tax collections and efforts to track the sale of the drug and prevent it from being diverted to the black market. The shortage of banking services is the latest challenge as Massachusetts approaches a July 1 deadline to begin sales of legal pot. The cannabis commission has been sparring with the Baker administration over the scale of the industry at the outset, with the governor advocating for a smaller, more controlled rollout and the commission proposing an expansive range of retail options. Baker’s office was cool to the idea of a government bank, saying it has no plans to create such an entity. — DAN ADAMS
HEALTH INSURANCE
For many state employees, premiums are going down
Massachusetts public employees and retirees received an unusual bit of good news from state officials Thursday: their health insurance premiums are not rising significantly — and costs for many will actually decrease. The rates approved by the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission apply to hundreds of thousands of state and local employees, retirees, and their families, including teachers, transportation workers, social workers, and those in all branches of state government. The commission came under fire last month after making a surprise decision to eliminate commercial health plans from three popular insurance companies, a change that would have disrupted some 200,000 people. That angered public workers, labor unions, and elected officials, and after an outcry, the commission reversed course and decided to maintain the commercial insurance options it currently offers. But public workers and retirees still worried that their health insurance costs could soar. The fact that premiums will remain relatively flat next year should come as a relief — at least, temporarily. “Our average premium increase will be zero — well ahead of our goal,’’ said Dr. Roberta Herman (left), executive director of the state commission, which is controlled by the Baker administration. Half of the people who get health benefits through the state will see their premiums go down, commission officials said. Forty percent will see premium increases, but for most of them, the increases will be 2 percent or less. For 10 percent of those enrolled in state health benefits, premiums will stay approximately the same. The new premiums take effect in July. Also, the benefits, copays, and deductibles for public workers and retirees will stay about the same. — PRIYANKA DAYAL MCCLUSKEY
JUSTICE SYSTEM
TelexFree fugitive could be target of extradition effort
The fugitive cofounder of TelexFree Inc., a multibillion-dollar pyramid scheme based in Massachusetts, has had his Brazilian citizenship revoked — a move that may open the door for his extradition to the United States. Carlos Wanzeler, who fled to his native Brazil in 2014, was stripped of his citizenship last week by the Brazilian Ministry of Justice, according to a report published in Diário Oficial da União, the official journal of the Brazilian federal government. Wanzeler, 49, left for Brazil — via Canada — the same day federal authorities raided TelexFree’s headquarters in Marlborough. US officials had been negotiating for Wanzeler’s return, but Brazil does not extradite its own citizens. By stripping Wanzeler of his citizenship, however, Brazilian authorities may be taking a step toward his extradition — a move that was employed recently with a fugitive Brazilian woman wanted in Ohio in connection with the 2007 killing of her husband. The Ministry of Justice said that Wanzeler was being stripped of this citizenship because he became a naturalized American citizen in 2009, according to the official government publication. Brazil’s constitution allows for citizenship to be revoked under certain circumstances, but it is rarely done. Wanzeler’s attorneys in Brazil have appealed the ruling. Meanwhile, authorities there are separately prosecuting TelexFree and its owners. Paul V. Kelly, a Boston attorney who represented Wanzeler and now represents his wife, who still lives in Massachusetts, wrote in an e-mail to the Globe that he was surprised by the revocation of citizenship. “It seems somewhat radical to me that Brazil can pass a new law, and then apply it in a legal proceeding that has been pending for several years, and against a person who was born and raised in that country,’’ Kelly said. The Boston office of US Attorney Andrew E. Lelling declined to comment. — KATHELEEN CONTI
RETAIL
Wayfair shares pummeled after down earnings report
The Boston-based furniture and housewares retailer Wayfair on Thursday posted a wider-than-expected fourth-quarter loss, sending its shares down 23 percent, the biggest one-day decline since the company went public in 2014. The sell-off was part of a familiar pattern: With each successive quarter’s earnings report, investors have increasingly shown concern about Wayfair’s outsize spending on operations and advertising without demonstrating an obvious path to profitability. A study from professors at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Emory University recently estimated that Wayfair’s stock price was overvalued by as much as 84 percent, in part due to the company’s high acquisition costs to bring in new shoppers. The academics’ number-crunching suggested that Wayfair loses $10 on every sale. “I felt deja vu,’’ Daniel McCarthy, one of study’s authors and a marketing professor at Emory University, said after hearing the numbers in the earnings report. He said that the company’s stock price has taken a hit after every report released for over a year. The problem, he said, is that Wayfair is spending an inordinate amount of money to acquire repeat customers, while the nature of the furniture business isn’t built on repeat sales. Wayfair shares fell $21.74 to $73.95 on Thursday. Despite the tumble, the stock is up 84 percent in the past year. The company chose to focus on the positive in its report, with its chief executive, Niraj Shah, citing the company’s “incredible growth’’ in 2017, with net revenue rising 40 percent to $4.7 billion. — JANELLE NANOS
CLINICAL TRIALS
Peanut allergy preventative closer to reality
An experimental treatment aimed at helping people with severe peanut allergy scored a clinical win Tuesday, putting it in line to possibly become the first drug to provide meaningful protection against accidental exposure. Based on the positive results, Aimmune Therapeutics expects to seek US approval for its preventative peanut allergy therapy by the end of the year, with a European filing in 2019, the company said. The company’s lead product, called AR101, is a capsule filled with a precise, measured quantity of peanut flour. The capsules are opened and mixed into food. The idea is simple: Expose people to small, escalating doses of ingestible peanut protein over time with the goal of desensitizing them enough to prevent severe reactions. Aimmune, based in California, is trying to standardize a peanut allergy protection method already tried on an ad hoc basis. The experimental treatment proved highly effective in a Phase 3 clinical trial that enrolled 554 people with severe peanut allergy. The results: 67 percent of patients age 4 to 17 tolerated at least a 600-milligram dose of peanut protein at the end of the study, compared with 4 percent of placebo patients. Six hundred milligrams of peanut protein is roughly the equivalent of two peanuts or a child-sized bite from a peanut butter sandwich. The patients entered the study not being able to tolerate exposure to 10 percent of a single peanut. — ADAM FEUERSTEIN
