Shares of Cambridge drug company Epizyme Inc. were up 42 percent in mid-day trading Friday in the company’s first day of public trading. Epizyme, which is looking to create personalized drugs for people with genetically defined cancers, had initially priced its stock offering at $15 a share. Around noon Friday, shares were trading at $21.38 a share. The company’s stock symbol is EPZM. In a press release, Epizyme said it was initially offering about 5.14 million shares to the public. As a result, the IPO has the potential to raise about $77 million. Citigroup, Cowen and Co., and Leerink Swann LLC are acting as joint book-running managers for the offering. JMP Securities LLC and Wedbush Securities Inc. are acting as co-managers, Epizyme said. Drugmaker Pfizer Inc. said it is expanding its Centers for Therapeutic Innovation into the development of small-molecule drug candidates through a partnership with the University of California, San Francisco. Roughly two years ago, Pfizer opened the Boston Centers for Therapeutic Innovation, or CTI, an entrepreneurial network of partnerships with leading academic medical centers. The hope is that these partnerships will reduce the time and cost of drug discovery and development. Boston is also the global headquarters for the CTI network, which has established partnerships in New York City, San Francisco, and San Diego. Pfizer has roughly 2,100 employees in Massachusetts, most of them in either Andover or Cambridge. The just-announced partnership provides researchers from the University of California, San Francisco with access to Pfizer’s small-molecule drug development capabilities. Boston ad agency Arnold Worldwide said it is launching ads for client Milk-Bone that suggest that dog biscuits can help folks bond with their mutts. Or as Arnold put it, the ads are “designed to elevate the owner-canine relationship by spotlighting those special bonding moments, such as that point at the end of a long day.” According to Arnold, this is Milk-Bone’s first national TV and fully integrated campaign in 10 years. Milk-Bond is a brand of Del Monte Foods, a large producer, distributor, and marketer of branded food and pet products. Other Arnold clients include Fidelity Investments, Jack Daniel’s, Progressive Insurance, and Volvo. Tablet shipments for educational uses grew sharply in the US last year because of strong interest by teachers, governments, and parents, according to IDC, a global market intelligence firm headquartered in Framingham. As efforts increased to digitize educational content, tablet shipments in the US education sector grew 103 percent year-over-year, IDC said in a report titled, “Tablets Changing the Education Sector in the United States, Major Momentum Underway.” Demand for these devices increased the share of tablets in the education client device market from 19.4 percent in 2011 to more than 35 percent in 2012. “While tablet sales to the education sector doubled from 2011 to 2012, we are only seeing the beginning of a much greater push that is likely to last for years,” IDC’s David Daoud said. National Donut Day is still over a week off, but already the pastry cooks and sinker sous-chefs at Dunkin’ Donuts are gearing up for this baked-goods bacchanal. National Donut Day falls on June 7 this year, and on that day, the Canton-based chain said that its participating restaurants “will offer guests a free donut of their choice (while supplies last) with the purchase of any beverage.” And that’s not all. The chain added that it is now unveiling Summer Fruit Donuts, which feature such flavors as Lemonade and Key Lime. Dunkin’ offered up this historical tidbit: “National Donut Day, celebrated on the first Friday of June each year, was originally established in 1938 by the Chicago Salvation Army to honor women who served donuts to soldiers during World War I.” Vintage Real Estate, a California company whose retail portfolio includes regional malls, said Thursday that it has bought the Mall at Whitney Field, a shopping complex in Leominster with about 75 stores, for an undisclosed amount. Vintage Real Estate added that Burlington Coat Factory has signed a lease at the mall for 66,000 square feet of space that was previously occupied by a Circuit City store. The space has been vacant since the Circuit City bankruptcy in 2008, Vintage Real Estate said; the Burlington Coat Factory store is expected to open early in 2014. The Mall at Whitney Field’s current line-up of anchor tenants includes Macy’s, Sears, J.C. Penney, Market Basket, Toys “R” Us, and Old Navy. Sun Life Financial Inc., which has US operations in Wellesley, said it has launched a marketing campaign titled “Wake Up” to highlight the group and voluntary employee benefits that the financial-services company offers. The campaign, created by ad agency Doremus New York, seeks to help people understand why employee benefits matter and to drive traffic to Sun Life’s website. According to Sun Life, the campaign is trying to raise awareness for the types of benefits that are available to protect a consumer’s family. Another campaign message: Sun Life can offer more than just basic insurance plans. “We want to change the benefits conversation, and ‘Wake Up’ is the campaign that will help us achieve this overarching mandate,” Sun Life executive Roberta Ruel said. |
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