Category: 3. Business

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Brown University Professor Emeritus of Economics Peter Howitt accepted the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences on Wednesday, Dec. 10, at the Stockholm Concert Hall in Sweden.

Howitt received a medal and a diploma from King of Sweden Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony during which the 2025 Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and literature were also awarded.

He shares half of the economics prize, which was awarded for “the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction,” with his longtime research partner Philippe Aghion; the other half was awarded to economic historian Joel Mokyr.

John Hassler, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences and member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, delivered a presentation speech that lauded Howitt, Aghion and Mokyr for advancing society’s understanding of the mechanisms underlying innovation-driven economic growth.

With Trump in White House, politics at the Fed is top of mindpublished at 18:22 GMT

18:22 GMT

Natalie Sherman
New York business reporter

Economists say the Fed’s ability to make its interest rate decisions independent of politics is key to its credibility as an inflation-fighter.

But Trump’s actions this year have sparked concerns that the bank’s independence could be under threat.

He has tried to fire one of the Fed governors, Lisa Cook, accusing her of committing mortgage fraud. She maintains his claims are baseless. The Supreme Court is set to take up that case next month, but in the meantime she has been allowed to stay on the board.

Trump has also repeatedly threatened to fire Powell, calling him a “numbskull”, “not a smart person” and pursuing him over his handling of building renovations.

Separately, an unexpected, short-term vacancy allowed Trump to install a new board member, Stephen Miran, who said he would take a leave from his White House role as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers but not resign.

Miran so far has proven a reliable voice echoing the president’s call for more aggressive rate cuts.

Image source, Reuters

Fast food chain Leon is planning to close restaurants and cut jobs, less than two months after it was bought back from Asda by its co-founder John Vincent.

The chain said on Wednesday that it had appointed administrators to lead a restructuring programme, and it was considering how many of its 71 restaurants would need to shut. It did not say how many roles could be affected.

Vincent, who founded Leon in 2004 with former government food tsar Henry Dimbleby and chef Allegra McEvedy, bought the business back in October, four years after he sold it to the billionaire Issa brothers’ EG Group petrol forecourts business in a £100m deal.

The chain has now hired advisers from Quantuma after applying for an administration order, and aims to put the business into administration as soon as possible, a process which will help it to manage debt payments as it attempts to secure its long-term future.

Since Vincent’s buyout, 10 outlets have already closed, including three overseas franchises, and the entrepreneur has announced plans to ditch Leon’s £25-a-month Roast Rewards scheme from January. Subscribers could claim up to five coffees a day and discounts on food.

He has also signed up staff to training in wing tsun, a martial art, to improve coffee-making times “while lowering heart rates”.

Asda, which the Issa brothers also invested in, bought Leon along with most of EG’s UK arm in 2023, but it has struggled under the ailing supermarket.

The fast food chain’s sales fell almost 4% to £62.5m in 2024 when it made a pre-tax loss of £8.38m, according to the latest accounts filed at Companies House.

Vincent said that, after a review, he had concluded that the company needed to downsize as the shift to working from home had reduced demand for takeaways.

He said: “If you look at the performance of Leon’s peers, you will see that everyone is facing challenges – companies are reporting significant losses due to working patterns and increasingly unsustainable taxes.

“Today for every pound we receive from the customer, around 36p goes to the government in tax, and about 2p ends up in the hands of the company. It’s why most players are reporting big losses.”

Vincent added that the “immediate priority” was to close the most unprofitable restaurants. The group has either found other brands to take on leases, or will be asking landlords to release the business from its commitments.

“We will rebuild Leon on its core values and I hope to be providing jobs to many more people once we have returned to profitability and can continue to grow again,” he said.

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According to Vincent, “Asda had bigger fish to fry” over the past two years, and “Leon was always a business they didn’t feel fitted their strategy”.

He added that the company would look to find work for affected staff in other Leon restaurants, and had established a scheme for employees to apply for jobs at Pret a Manger.

Vincent bought back the chain shortly after co-founder Dimbleby told a grocery industry conference that Leon’s owners were set to “destroy the brand” by moving away from its original aim to sell “delicious food that is convenient and healthy” – and instead offering unhealthy meal deals, including high-calorie foods such as fries, chicken nuggets and cakes.

The company said at the time: “We’ll keep evolving, as we always have, but our mission hasn’t changed: to make fast food good food – delicious, affordable, and better for you.”

Vincent and Dimbleby, advocates of healthy eating, developed the concept of “naturally fast food” for Leon, and also created a school food plan for the government in 2013. They met at the management consultancy Bain & Company, where they bonded over a “dislike of premade sandwiches served from neon-lit chiller cabinets”, the company has said.

Yokohama, Japan – Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. and Wayve today announced the signing of definitive agreements to collaborate on integrating the next-generation ProPILOT series with Wayve AI technology across a broad range of Nissan vehicles. This partnership will combine Wayve’s embodied AI software with Nissan’s advanced driver-assistance systems to support both ADAS and point-to-point advanced driving.

Nissan introduced ProPILOT in 2016 for single-lane highway assistance and launched ProPILOT 2.0 in 2019, adding multi-lane support and hands-off functionality. These features are now available across multiple models to meet diverse customer needs. Building on this foundation, Nissan is developing its next-generation ProPILOT integrated with Wayve AI. In September 2025, Nissan unveiled a prototype featuring Wayve’s cutting-edge embodied AI software, ‘Wayve AI Driver’ integrated with Nissan’s “Ground Truth Perception” technology leveraging next-generation LiDAR. This prototype demonstrated smooth, safe driving assistance on highways and in complex urban environments.

Under the new agreement, Nissan and Wayve will integrate ‘Wayve AI Driver’ into the next generation ProPILOT series, enabling deployment in mass-produced vehicles. By leveraging Wayve’s AI technology, Nissan aims to further enhance the functionality and convenience of ProPILOT and deliver advanced systems to global markets, including Japan and North America, to meet diverse customer needs. Nissan plans to introduce the first model equipped with this new generation of ProPILOT in Japan in fiscal year 2027.

This agreement represents an important advancement for both companies. Nissan is the first automaker to commit to deploying Wayve AI systems at scale across a broad range of vehicle segments. Wayve’s end-to-end embodied AI, designed with safety at its core, can adapt efficiently to new cities and vehicle platforms with minimal additional development. When combined with ProPILOT series various sensor configurations including cameras, radar and LiDAR, it can deliver intelligent driving across many vehicle segments.

Deploying the system into mass-produced vehicles will allow Nissan and Wayve to learn from diverse real-world driving conditions, enabling continuous improvement and strengthening the long-term competitiveness of Nissan’s intelligent driving technologies.

 

Comment from Ivan Espinosa, President and CEO, Nissan Motor Co., Ltd.

“By combining Nissan’s advanced autonomous driving expertise with Wayve’s state-of-the-art AI technology, we are setting a new benchmark for driver assistance. The widespread adoption of our next-generation ProPILOT integrated with Wayve AI will deliver safer, more intuitive and more comfortable driving experiences to customers worldwide, while accelerating the transition toward an intelligent mobility future. This agreement is an important step in Nissan’s mission to revolutionize mobility making it cleaner, safer, and more inclusive.”

 

Comment from Alex Kendall, Co-founder and CEO, Wayve

“Nissan is leading the way among global automakers by bringing embodied AI toward mass production. We are proud to partner with Nissan to make next-generation intelligent driving technology accessible to customers worldwide. By combining Wayve’s rapidly advancing AI with Nissan’s engineering and global reach, we can accelerate the pace of innovation toward safe and delightful autonomous mobility.”

 

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The successful trial provides a path to future immunotherapies, assessing advanced biomaterial-based cancer vaccines in combination with checkpoint blockade inhibitors

By Benjamin Boettner 

(BOSTON) — The first-in-human phase I clinical trial assessing the feasibility and safety of WDVAX, an immunostimulatory biomaterial-based cancer vaccine, in a cohort of 21 patients with stage 4 metastatic melanoma, was concluded with positive outcomes that encourage future vaccine developments and trials to test them in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitor therapies.

Initiated in 2013 by the Wyss Institute at Harvard University and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI), and led by F. Stephen Hodi, Jr., M.D., Director of DFCI’s Melanoma Center and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS), the trial demonstrated that a precisely engineered biomaterial-based multi-component system is feasible to be consistently fabricated and applied to patients. The significant immune-activating functions of the monotherapy correlated with 43% of the patients exhibiting stable disease.

The novel vaccine concept originated in the laboratory of Wyss Founding Core Faculty member David Mooney, Ph.D. Mooney, together with his group at the Wyss Institute and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), advanced the novel immunotherapy solution through a series of foundational studies. In addition to developing the capabilities needed to fabricate the biomaterial vaccines, the Mooney group, in collaboration with that of Glenn Dranoff, M.D., who at the time was a Wyss Associate Faculty member and co-leader of DFCI’s Cancer Vaccine Center, had carried out extensive preclinical studies to demonstrate the approach’s efficacy.

The team demonstrated that the vaccines can induce the regression of multiple types of tumors in animal models and, in addition, provided prophylactic protection. These foundational and translational efforts led to the first-in-human WDVAX clinical trial assessing this new type of cancer vaccine, whose results were recently published in Cancer Immunology Research.

The vaccination concept holds that a porous biomaterial scaffold made from a widely used biodegradable medical polymer and infused with bioactive molecules can function as a training ground for the immune system. By infusing the scaffold with the cytokine molecule GM-CSF, dendritic cells (DC) – central orchestrators of immune responses – are recruited into the porous scaffold interior, where they are activated by additionally infused CpG oligonucleotides that function as an adjuvant. To prime DCs specifically against cancer cells, the WDVAX trial team loaded the scaffold with inactivated tumor antigens derived from tumors of the trial participants. The Mooney and Dranoff teams’ preclinical studies had shown that, upon their activation, the reprogrammed DCs migrate from the scaffold to nearby lymph nodes, where they activate T cells that engage in a coordinated attack on tumor cells.

The development and study of the personalized cancer vaccine was funded by the Wyss Institute, DFCI, and the National Institutes of Health, and the crucial technologies invented for its realization are owned or co-owned by Harvard University, DFCI, and the University of Michigan.

From feasibility to immune activation

To demonstrate the clinical feasibility of WDVAX therapy in a dose-escalation study of melanoma patients, the trial’s goal was to show that a fabrication process could be put into place that was able to produce sufficient WDVAX vaccines within 28 days following the resection of patients’ tumors to allow for multiple consecutive treatments of the same patients with personalized vaccines. Using the Mooney lab’s proprietary recipe, team members at DFCI’s Cell Manipulation Core Facility loaded inactivated tumor antigens contained in lysed tumor samples into the biomaterial scaffolds and successfully manufactured WDVAX vaccines in a beneficial time frame for all patients in the 15-patient expansion cohort. They also succeeded in producing sufficient vaccine for seven out of eight additional trial participants. The study thus established a clinically applicable vaccine manufacturing process and showed that vaccine fabrication per se likely won’t be a bottleneck for evaluating similar types of biomaterials-based vaccines in future trials.

To introduce WDVAX vaccines into patients’ bodies, surgeons on the team simply had to make a small incision in the upper arm or thighs, implant the manufactured vaccines under the skin, and suture the wound. The patients were then closely monitored for signs of immune reactions and often exhibited a significant local response at the implant site.

Next, to evaluate the feasibility of conducting WDVAX clinical trials, the team’s other goals were to assess the overall survival of the vaccine recipients and to analyze their immune responses. After receiving their tumor-specific WDVAX vaccines, none of the patients developed treatment-related adverse events with life-threatening consequences, and, importantly, 43% of all patients in the entire cohort had stable disease. The researchers compared patients’ tumor samples before and after vaccination and found that WDAX treatment indeed induced T cells and other types of immune cells in the tumor microenvironment. Specifically, the numbers of CD4+ T cells that normally coordinate immune attacks within tumors were found to be variably increased, cytotoxic CD8+ T cells with tumor cell-killing potential had variably infiltrated the tumors, and myeloid cells of the immune system also were present at elevated numbers.

At the same time, they also found that T cells that entered tumors upon WDVAX vaccination upregulated so-called checkpoint proteins. Checkpoint proteins generally act as “brakes” that prevent T cells from attacking tumor cells. Hodi, Mooney, and the team therefore speculate that taking a two-pronged approach in future clinical trials could be promising. By combining WDVAX-like vaccines with widely used checkpoint inhibitor therapy, a tumor-specific T cell response could be launched in tumor environments in which the immune system’s ability to fight the tumors would be additionally enhanced. Such a coordinated immunotherapy could advance treatment success to potentially enable the regression of tumors, as seen by Mooney’s group for monotherapy with WDVAX vaccines alone in preclinical animal models carrying aggressive melanoma tumors.

We are confident that integrating newer insights in next-generation approaches and combining those with other forms of immunotherapy, including checkpoint inhibitor therapy, can result in new breakthroughs in the treatment of patients suffering from different types of cancer.

Supercharging the next wave of biomaterial vaccine

“Since the WDVAX trial was started, our group and other groups have made a number of important advances in the biomaterial cancer vaccine space. Next-generation injectable [not implantable] scaffolds have emerged that, among other favorable characteristics, have the ability to further shape immune responses. Also, the technological capabilities of identifying patient-specific tumor antigens with immune-activating potential are constantly evolving,” said Mooney. “We are confident that integrating these newer insights in next-generation approaches and combining those with other forms of immunotherapy, including checkpoint inhibitor therapy, can result in new breakthroughs in the treatment of patients suffering from different types of cancer.” Mooney is also the Robert P. Pinkas Family Professor of Bioengineering at SEAS.

“The promising results of this world-first trial evaluating a personalized, biomaterial-based cancer vaccine in patients with an aggressive cancer are a testament to the Wyss Institute’s capability of driving potentially life-saving medical developments from their initial inception, through research and preclinical stages, all the way to the patients that need them,” said Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D. “Dave Mooney’s team and their collaborators at the DFCI created an important translational path that will super-charge the next wave of such innovative cancer vaccines at the Wyss and at other cancer centers around the world.” Ingber is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, and the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at SEAS.

Other authors on the study were Anita Giobbie-Hurder, Kwasi Adu-Berchie, Srin Ranasinghe, Ana Lako, Mariano Severgnini, Emily Thrash, Jason Weirather, Joanna Baginska, Michael Manos, Edward Doherty, Alexander Stafford, Heather Daley, Jerome Ritz, Patrick Ott, Kathleen Pfaff, Scott Rodig, and Charles Yoon.

WASHINGTON, Dec 10 (Reuters) – The U.S. banking regulator overseeing large national banks said the nation’s nine largest firms had in the past placed restrictions on providing financial services to some controversial industries in a practice commonly described as “debanking.”

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency did not divulge specifics on the banks in its preliminary report, but vowed to hold the firms “accountable,” including potential referrals to the Justice Department, once it concluded its review. It said banks had restricted access to industries including oil and gas, coal mining, tobacco and e-cigarettes, and crypto products.

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The agency plans to continue examining the matter, saying it is reviewing “thousands” of complaints for examples of debanking on the basis of political or religious beliefs. The report did not provide specific examples, but said the firms examined were JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC, TD Bank and BMO Bank.

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