Wayfair's roller coaster | Power 50! | Biogen's new drug | A cannabis trailblazer

Welcome to the BBJ's LinkedIn Weekly Edition! I'm Digital Editor Jess Aloe, bringing you the top business stories from this week, plus what's going on in Boston's tech economy.

Is brick-and-mortar the answer to Wayfair's roller coaster ride?

While waiting out the pandemic, homebound customers made something unique happen for Boston-based Wayfair Inc. For the first time in the online furniture retailer’s six-year history as a public company, the company turned a profit in the summer of 2020.

Two years later, that trend turned out to be short-lived. As Wayfair moves forward with plans to open physical retail stores across the state, it’s facing ever-widening losses on the bottom line and a declining number of active customers. The company has laid off hundreds of workers as a result, and while some experts say the company is now on the right track, others are getting impatient with the rate at which Wayfair is burning through cash.

Read more here about Wayfair's roller coaster stock ride and the biggest questions investors are asking, from Lucia Maffei .

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What else happened this week:

BBJ announces Power 50

The Boston Business Journal has named its Power 50: Movement Makers, an annual list of Boston-area businesspeople who are making the biggest impact on the region. Congratulations to all the winners—check out the full list here.

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Biogen's new Alzheimer's drug shows promise

Biogen Inc. has spent the past year shedding assets following the disastrous rollout of its first Alzheimer's disease drug. But the company’s shares skyrocketed this week after positive data from its new Alzheimer’s drug, developed with Eisai US , was released. Rowan Walrath took a look at the drug, lecanemab, could mean for the Cambridge company’s future. Learn more here.

Plus, read about how Alzheimer’s patient advocates reacted to the news here.

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Boston's cannabis trailblazer

“How come there are no Black woman owners? ...Why weren’t Black people owning? There's plenty of people who are investors in tech who can't code." - Nike John, owner of The Heritage Club.

At age 30, Nike John has become first Black woman — and youngest person — to be the sole owner of a cannabis dispensary in Boston. Read more about John and her dispensary, The Heritage Club , here.

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Net-zero now

Boston is proposing that larger new buildings in the city would be required to achieve “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions under city regulations essentially as soon as they open their doors. Learn more about the proposal here.

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Motherboards and molecules — this week in Boston's tech economy:

Amylyx Pharmaceuticals won approval from the FDA for its first ALS drug. Learn more here.

Prime Medicine, Inc. , a gene-editing startup that spun out of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard just last year, filed for a $100 million IPO. It's just the seventh biotech to take the leap this year. Read more.

Boston finally has a new unicorn after a nearly three-month dry spell for companies crossing the $1 billion valuation mark. Wasabi Technologies has become Boston's latest unicorn after raising $125 million in a Series D round led by L2 Point Management.

It's Form D Friday! This week, fundraises from Valor Performance, Inc. , SeaTrac Systems, Inc. , Piton Therapeutics, Inc. , New Frontier Bio and Tour24 . Find out how much they raised here.

This week on The Petri Dish: iSpecimen 's founding CEO and its longtime COO depart. CFO Tracy Curley will serve as interim CEO. Also: Pfizer -backed DEM Biopharma, Inc. names Nenad Grmusa as its first full-time CEO and chief scientific officer. Read more about what you may have missed in Boston's busy biotech business world here.

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Finally...

Can you guess which local institution got the most money from the NIH in fiscal 2022? The answer may surprise you.

This Weekly Edition was compiled by Jess Aloe. This is a new feature from the Boston Business Journal, and she wants to hear your thoughts. Questions? Comments? Concerns? Send them her way.