Moderna Therapeutics, a Cambridge company specializing in messenger RNA therapeutics as a way to create new drugs, said Wednesday that John Reynders will join Moderna in early July as its first chief information officer. Reynders joins Moderna from AstraZeneca, where he served as vice president of R&D information, and has held senior leadership positions over the past decade at Johnson & Johnson, Lilly, and Celera Genomics. At Moderna, Reynders will lead a team that seeks to create an information infrastructure critical to all aspects of the company’s innovation model, including the use of genomic data in drug design. Messenger RNA therapeutics is a new drug modality that produces human proteins or antibodies inside patient cells. This platform addresses currently undruggable targets. Nucleik, a student team that developed software to reduce paper work for law enforcement officials, is the grand prize winner of the Harvard University President’s Challenge for social entrepreneurship, Harvard president Drew Faust said Wednesday in a statement. Faust developed the challenge last year to encourage university students to devise entrepreneurial solutions to some of the world’s most important social problems. Nucleik will receive $70,000 to support its emerging business. The team is made up of Scott Crouch, Florian Mayr, and Matthew Polega, all Harvard College seniors. The system they developed “provides instantaneous access to accurate and organized data to help law enforcement officers tackle gang violence, murders, and violent crime,” Harvard said. In the challenge’s second year, 127 student-led teams entered the competition. About 34.8 million Americans are projected to travel 50 miles or more from home during the Memorial Day holiday weekend, a 0.9 percent decrease from last year, AAA Southern New England said. “AAA is forecasting Memorial Day travel to experience a slight dip as lower gas prices and economic improvements from last year are not strong enough to spur an increase in travelers,” Lloyd P. Albert, AAA Southern New England senior vice president of public and government affairs, said in a statement. “Still, the projections are in line with what we’ve seen in travel over Memorial Day since 2010.” Holiday air travel this year is projected to drop 8 percent to 2.3 million from 2012. Memorial Day travel originating from New England is in line with national projections. Swirl, a Boston company developing marketing software for retailers, said Wednesday it is testing an iPhone app that will send customized offers to consumers while they are browsing a store equipped with special sensors. Alex and Ani, Timberland, Kenneth Cole, and the Blues Jean Bar are among the retailers trying out Swirl technology in some of their stores. For the plan to work, Swirl has to first persuade consumers to download a special app to their iPhones. Consumers would also have to opt in to a location-tracking feature that would alert the retailer when a consumer with the app walked into one of the retailer’s stores. Once on the premises, the consumer would be pinged, and a message on his or her iPhone could offer customized suggestions or special discounts. Five brokerage firms that sold so-called non-traded REITs improperly, will make restitution to investors of about $8.6 million and pay a total of $975,000 in fines under settlements reached with Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin, Galvin’s office said Wednesday. REITs are real estate investment trusts. “Our investigation into the sales of REITs, triggered by investor complaints, showed a pattern of impropriety in the sales of these popular but risky investments on the part of independent brokerage firms where supervision has historically been difficult to maintain,” Galvin said. The firms that settled are Ameriprise Financial Services, Commonwealth Financial Network, Royal Alliance Associates, Securities America, and Lincoln Financial Advisors. Galvin also announced that LPL Financial had completed the second round of its restitution in connection with similar violations previously settled with his office. American International College in Springfield has selected FORGE Worldwide of Boston to be its lead ad agency for a rebranding assignment, FORGE Worldwide president Harry Chapin said. The account was awarded after a brief agency review. Billings for the account are not being disclosed. The assignment calls for FORGE to develop an awareness campaign that will rebrand the college’s Curtis Blake Center and Day School, which offers day-school and tutoring services for children with language-based learning disabilities. The work will include developing a new corporate identity and logo as well as search engine marketing, video, and direct marketing. The new work is expected to break in October. Other FORGE clients include Dragon Naturally Speaking speech-recognition software, SBLI, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Rockland Trust. he Massachusetts’ economy is expected to grow slowly before accelerating in early 2014, benefiting from boost from unexpected sector, -- manufacturing, according to an economic forecast released Wednesday by a group of regional economists. Although Massachusetts is in the midst of a slowdown in hiring, the five-year forecast by the New England Economic Partnership shows the state’s economy adding jobs at a significant pace beginning next year. The state’s unemployment rate of 6.4 percent in April is expected to decline to 5.2 percent by the end of 2017, the report said. “The outlook for the future is much better than it has been and that has a lot to do with restoring confidence and consumer demand,” said Alan Clayton-Matthews, a Northeastern University economics professor | | |
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