Infinity Pharmaceuticals partnership sends stock soaring

Shares of Cambridge biotech company Infinity Pharmaceuticals soared yesterday after it announced it has inked a partnership with pharmaceutical giant Abb­Vie to develop its blood cancer drug.

The companies will jointly­ develop the cancer drug duvelisib, which is under­going clinical trials to treat a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and a type of leukemia. Shares of Infinity shot up 44 percent, closing at $15.73.

"This collaboration is an important step toward fulfilling Infinity's objective of bringing better treatments to patients," Adelene Perkins, president and CEO of Infinity, said in a statement. "AbbVie will be a wonderful partner for Infinity, bringing all of the expertise and scale of a successful, well-­established company, together with the energy, drive, innovation and nimbleness of a young organization."

Under the agreement, Infinity will get an up-front payment of $275 million and up to $530 million in payments when certain milestones are met.

Infinity spokeswoman Jaren Irene Madden said the agreement will help fund future trials for the drug, which could lead to it being approved for treatment of other blood cancers.

"We have early data that shows that this drug is active across a broad range of blood cancers," Madden said. "Both the up-front and the milestone (payments) will enable us to fund these clinical studies."

AbbVie yesterday also announced a partnership with Google spin-out Calico that is developing drugs for cancer and diseases including Alzheimer's. Google executives have described Calico as a project that will enable people to live longer.

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CVS snuffs out tobacco sales

CVS Caremark stopped selling cigarettes and other CVS tobacco products yesterday at its 7,700 pharmacies — an industry-first for a national pharmacy chain and almost a month earlier than planned — and changed its name to CVS Health to better-position itself as a health care provider.

The Woonsocket, R.I.-based company also announced the launch of a personalized smoking-­cessation program.

CVS has been trying for a long time to integrate its business more closely with other health care providers, according to Meredith Adler, an analyst at Barclays Capital.

"There is a shortage of primary-care physicians, there are more services that pharmacists themselves can provide, and there's certainly a great deal of opportunity to help people with chronic health conditions," she said. "To be selling cigarettes ... and at the same time wanting to help people improve their health … was inconsistent."

The company said in February that it would forgo the low-margin tobacco sales by Oct. 1, a move that will cost it almost $2 billion in annual sales.

In the wake of the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act adding 8 million people to insurance rolls nationwide, empha­sizing its health care offerings and positioning itself as a preferred partner for U.S. companies and insurers should make up for the lost tobacco sales, David Larsen, an analyst with Boston's Leerink Partners, told Bloomberg.

"They are expanding on the basis of in-store clinics, deeper relationships with health plan customers and integrated health systems around the country," Larsen said.

CVS' announcement yesterday garnered a shout-out from the White House.

"As one of our country's largest retailers and pharmacies, the newly named CVS Health is setting a powerful example that we hope others in the industry will follow," White House press secretary Josh Earnest said in a statement.

CVS yesterday pointed to its own self-funded study that showed city bans of tobacco sales at retail pharmacies in San Francisco in 2010 and Boston in 2011 were "associated with up to a 13.3 percent reduction in purchasers of tobacco products."

Its removal of the tobacco products has resulted in "some small adjustments" to store employees' schedules, CVS spokesman Mike DeAneglis said. "But in the majority of our stores, any reduction in hours will be minimal, and we don't expect it to result in any loss of jobs," he said.

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CVS changes name, stops tobacco sales early

As CVS sharpens its focus on customer health, the nation's second-largest drugstore chain will tweak its corporate name and stop the sale of tobacco nearly a month sooner than planned.

CVS Caremark said it will now be known as CVS Health, effective immediately. The signs on its roughly 7,700 drugstores won't change, so the tweak may not register with shoppers.

However, those customers will see a big change when they check out. The cigars and cigarettes that used to fill the shelves behind store cash registers have been replaced with nicotine gum and other products that help people kick the tobacco habit. CVS said earlier this year that it would stop selling tobacco products on Oct. 1.

CVS and other drugstores have delved deeper into customer health care in recent years, in part to serve the aging Baby Boom generation and the millions of uninsured people who are expected to gain coverage under the federal health care overhaul. They've built hundreds of walk-in clinics in their stores and have steadily expanded the services they provide.

Drugstores now offer an array of vaccinations and flu shots, and their clinics can help monitor chronic illnesses like diabetes or high blood pressure. CVS said its new name reflects its broader commitment to health care.

"We're doing more and more to extend the front lines of health care," CEO Larry Merlo said.

As part of this push, the drugstore chain announced earlier this year that it would phase out tobacco sales.

The company said it could no longer sell tobacco in a setting where health care is delivered, and the presence of that product was hard to justify when it tried teaming up with hospital groups and doctors to help with patient care.

Merlo said the company moved up its quit date nearly a month because they got ready for the move sooner than they anticipated, not because its distribution centers had already run out of tobacco.

The corporate name change represents an improvement because the average person didn't understand the word Caremark, which represents the company's pharmacy benefits management business, said Laura Ries, president of the brand consulting firm Ries & Ries.

The new name may provide a better sense of what CVS does to the few investors or people on Wall Street who don't know about the company, which is ranked 12th in the 2014 Fortune 500.

But Ries said the name's power is limited because health is a generic word that is common in many company names.

"It's an improvement off of Caremark, but it's not some amazing wonderful thing that will change the world," she said.

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Providence Journal lays off staffers ahead of deal

The Providence Journal yesterday laid off several staffers as part of New Media Investment Group's acquisition of the paper.

Metro columnist Bob Kerr of Fall River, with the Journal for more than 43 years, said he was told at least 20 people lost their jobs. He was one of four staffers called into a meeting with human resources late yesterday morning.

"I was given a severance package with no explanation," he said. "It's tough."

Kerr, 69, said staffers received an email last Thursday saying New Media would "make offers of employment to most of the current employees."

Other staffers in Facebook posts said they had been informed they will be laid off Feb. 18, when all copy editing and page design will be handled out of Austin, Texas. The Providence Newspaper Guild declined to comment.

New Media's $46 million deal to acquire the Journal from Dallas-based A.H. Belo was announced in July. Neither firm, responded to requests for information yesterday.

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Keep all four tires the same size or hurt drive train

My co-worker had a flat left front tire on her 2002 Jeep Liberty. She had no spare and the service station didn't have her size. They sold her a bigger tire than the other three. I told her she would have handling issues, mileage would be affected and there would be stress on the front end, differential and transmission. There's an awkward tilt of the Jeep toward the passenger side. I told her she would be at high risk for rollover. Am I right?

You win the good Samaritan award! Assuming her Jeep is four-wheel drive, mounting a tire of significantly larger diameter is absolutely wrong. The difference in rolling diameter will generate considerable stress on driveshafts, differentials and the transfer case.

I don't think the "awkward tilt" of the vehicle would significantly increase the chance of a single-car rollover, but it certainly won't help vehicle stability. The binding of the drivetrain may cause a reduction in fuel mileage, but the larger concern is a potential failure in the drivetrain.

You did the right thing; now make sure she gets that tire replaced with one that is the same size and diameter as the other three. I'd be inclined to revisit the issue with the service station — they certainly should have known better.

I hope you can help with my 1999 Durango 5.9 SLT with 115,000 miles. It runs fine but at inconsistent times — winter or summer, newly started or running a while, under load or no load or even parked — the engine begins to misfire and loses 80 to 90 percent of its power. No gauges or warning lights indicate a problem before or after the event.

I've been able to pull over, turn the engine off then restart it again and it runs fine just like the problem never occurred. In the past nine months the frequency of this has increased and a couple weeks ago I experienced a new event. While pulling a 2-ton trailer and slowing down for a stop sign, the engine completely died in a split second. I immediately noticed the odometer did not show the typical miles numbers but did show jumbled lines and dashes. It did not start right up — it took three tries of cranking it for an extended period and then it started and ran fine.

I have repeatedly taken it in to a reputable mechanic and the local Dodge dealer for inspections and diagnostics that turn up nothing. Might you have some guidance for me?

Could Christine have morphed into a Durango? Intermittent issues can be, and often are, difficult to pinpoint even with modern on-board diagnostics built into the vehicle. Since there appear to be no DTC fault codes stored in the computer, I'd initially focus on potential mechanical causes such as a clogged/restricted catalytic converter or exhaust system. Exhaust back pressure can build until it literally chokes the engine. When the engine stalls, the back pressure is released and the engine may well restart and run fine again — for a while. A simple exhaust back pressure test with the pressure gauge screwed into the oxygen sensor port might confirm this — there should be less than roughly 2 psi of back pressure in the exhaust.

With the age of the vehicle, make sure the coil and ignition wires are in good shape and not generating any crossfire or grounding under load.

I can't explain the bizarre odometer display, but it may indicate some kind of electrical anomaly that caused the stall. The best bet for pinpointing something like this is to plug a data recorder (co-pilot) into the diagnostic link and drive the vehicle until another event occurs. Lock the event data into the recorder and have the shop or dealership download the data — it allows them to monitor what happened in real time, hopefully pinpointing the culprit. Good luck.

Paul Brand, author of "How to Repair Your Car," is an automotive troubleshooter, driving instructor and former race-car driver. Readers may write to him at: Star Tribune, 425 Portland Ave. S., Minneapolis, Minn., 55488 or via email at paul brand@startribune.com. Please explain the problem in detail and include a daytime phone number.

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Device opens DNA testing to masses

When Sebastian Kraves was growing up in Argentina, his grandmother gave him something transformative: "The Voyage of the Beagle," Charles Darwin's account of his voyage to the Galapagos Islands, where he made observations that led to his theory of evolution.

"I was blown away by the diversity of life on Earth and how it's all encoded by DNA," Kraves said. "But in high school, when I said I wanted to become a DNA scientist, people laughed and told me to go study something useful."

So he did. After earning his Ph.D. in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, he teamed up with Ezequiel Alvarez Saavedra, a former classmate from Argentina who obtained his Ph.D. in biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and they founded Amplyus, a MassChallenge finalist that aims to make DNA technology accessible not only to scientists, but to the masses.

Alvarez Saavedra was the lead developer of their miniPCR — or polymerase chain reaction — machine, which searches for a very specific part of the genome and then makes copies of it. At 2 inches by 5 inches, it's about one-tenth the size of a traditional PCR machine and, at $799, about one-fifth to one-tenth the cost.

Clinicians in a hospital lab can use the miniPCR to test patients for increased risk of certain diseases. Health authorities can use the machine to test food for the presence of E. coli or salmonella. And students can use it to do "CSI-like" forensic testing in the classroom.

"One of those 'got-to-know' procedures is the use of PCR," said Alia Qatarneh, the research assistant at Harvard University's Life Sciences Outreach Program, which works with high school students from across New England. "Students get what PCR is in theory but rarely have the opportunity to run a PCR reaction themselves from start to finish."

"Zeke and Sebastian's miniPCR machine allows for many things," Qatarneh said. "It's incredibly affordable, allows for students to have direct, hands-on experience and takes away part of the mysterious 'black-box effect' that tends to overshadow the science of PCR."

At CampBio, the summer outreach program of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, the Amplyus team led two workshops for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders, who role-played Centers for Disease Control scientists examining a claim of tainted beef. The students used the machines to determine which batches were positive for E. coli.

"Exposure to these types of hands-on experiences at such an impressionable age can spark a lifelong interest in science," said Amy Tremblay, the institute's public programs officer. "Through the interactive and cutting-edge workshop the Amplyus team was able to incorporate into CampBio, we may have done just that."

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