Major US toymaker speeds up plan to move manufacturing out of China

 The biggest toy maker in the US is enlarging the footprint of its two domestic factories by 50% — a response to surging demand from retailers as Trump’s tariffs threaten to raise costs, The Post has learned.

Cra-Z-Art, New Jersey-based arts and crafts company, is investing “millions of dollars” to add more than 500,000 square feet to its factories in Tennessee and Florida – despite a lack of clarity on whether tariffs will rise, fall or spark a recession after the US imposed a 20% levy on goods from China, according to its owner.

Cra-Z-Art chairman Lawrence Rosen said he’s responding partly to retailers who fear the tariffs will squelch consumer demand as basic necessities become more expensive. While Rosen declined to name specific retail customers, Cra-Z-Art goods appear on the websites of major chains including Walmart, Target, Amazon and Walgreens.

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Lawrence Rosen, chairman and owner of Craz-Z-Art, and CEO Nellie Mahabir are moving a large portion of manufacturing from China to the U.S.Cra-Z-Art

“We are getting a tremendous amount of pressure from them because they are concerned about keeping their pricing competitive,” Rosen said. “We are protecting our customers and ourselves.”

Big-box chains see domestic manufacturing as a way to “de-risk” against the tariffs, according to Rosen. The retailers have promised Rosen that if he makes more products in the US – including its “Softee Dough,” “Massaging Foot Spa,” “Sidewalk Chalk” and “Spiral Art” sets – they will buy more. 

In response, the 102-year-old, family-owned company – which makes art sets, slime, markers, paints, pencils and puzzles in the US and in China – has spent the past month shipping manufacturing equipment, including plastic molds, to the US from Asia.

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Slime is one of Cra-Z-Art’s best selling toys and it’s made in the U.S. and in China.Cra-Z-Art

“We are moving a large percentage of what we have in China to here, duplicating some machinery and investing in high speed automation equipment,” said Rosen, whose family founded the company a century ago.

“When Trump announced the higher tariffs on China, it’s been full steam ahead,” Rosen added. “I’d rather control my own destiny than be subject to the ups and downs and the daily changes to tariffs.”

Cra-Z-Art already makes about 35% of its products in the US including pencils, jigsaw puzzles, storage boxes, crayons and markers. Now, it’s planning to increase its domestic production to at least 45%.

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Lawrence Rosen’s family founded Cra-Z-Art more than a century ago.Lawrence Rosen/LinkedIn

Rosen estimates that his investment will double the company’s revenues to $400 million within the next two years. But he also aims to goose profits by saving money and time.

Plastic, which is made from fossil fuels, costs less to produce in the US than in China. Overseas freight costs of $4,000 to $11,000 per 40-foot container will be eliminated. Manufacturing in the US also slashes the time it takes to make and deliver products to 90 days, Rosen said.

Cra-Z-Art is among a handful of US companies that make toys in the US, including MGA Entertainment’s Little Tikes and privately owned Simplay3, both of which operate Ohio facilities that are focused on larger, outdoor toys. American Plastic Toys in Michigan also makes riding toys, furniture and outdoor toy sets.

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Cra-Z-Art opened its Jacksonville, Fla. factory in 2021.Cra-Z-Art

The vast majority of toys are made in China, where the cost of labor remains low at between $3 and $4 an hour.

Rosen is investing in pricey robotic equipment to expand his factories in Lewisburg Tenn., where the company owns its building and in Jacksonville, Fla. where it has been renting since 2021. 

“You need more automation in the US because of the higher pay,” Rosen said. He declined to comment on how many additional employees he may hire in the US.

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Cra-Z-Art is the largest toy manufacture in the U.S., with two factories in the U.S.Cra-Z-Art

Some labor-intensive items like Barbie dolls that have hair, painted faces and stitched clothing are not cost-efficient to make in the US, experts say.

Like the handful of other US toy makers, Rosen also is fielding calls from competitors who want Cra-Z-Art to manufacture some of their products.

Rosen noted that he owns a 20% stake in publicly held Jakks Pacific of Santa Monica, Calif., which makes Fly Wheels ride toys among other items.

“I can produce for another company,” Rosen said. “They could be one of the companies I do that for.”

https://nypost.com/2025/03/13/business/uss-biggest-toy-maker-cra-z-art-to-expand-domestic-factories/

'Ontario Premier Says U.S.-Canada Tensions Have Cooled After Lutnick Meeting'

 Ontario Premier Doug Ford says there has been a de-escalation of trade tensions between Canada and the U.S. following a meeting Thursday with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

"We've had a very, very productive meeting," Ford told reporters after a meeting with Lutnick in Washington. Canadian officials were also in attendance and are expected to speak later Thursday.

"We feel that the temperature is being lowered," Ford said, adding that Ontario and Canadian officials have secured another meeting with Lutnick next week.

Ford secured a meeting with President Trump's top trade-policy official after a tumultuous Tuesday, when Trump threatened to double tariffs, to 50%, on Canadian steel and aluminum in retaliation against Ontario's 25% surtax on electricity exports to New York, Michigan and Minnesota. Ford later dropped the surcharge.

Ford declined to answer reporters' questions about the future of that surcharge.

https://www.morningstar.com/news/dow-jones/2025031312235/ontario-premier-says-us-canada-tensions-have-cooled-after-lutnick-meeting

US Senate Democrats to clear way for stopgap bill, avert shutdown, Punchbowl News reports

 Top U.S. Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer told colleagues behind closed doors on Thursday that he would vote to advance a stopgap funding bill, signaling that his party would provide the votes to avert a government shutdown, Punchbowl News reported, citing Democratic aides and lawmakers.

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2025-03-13/us-senate-democrats-to-clear-way-for-stopgap-bill-avert-shutdown-punchbowl-news-reports

 The White House has directed the FBI to stop conducting background checks into dozens of U.S. President Donald Trump's top staffers, and to transfer the process to the Pentagon, ABC News reported Thursday, citing sources familiar with the matter.

The report says the directive came last month after White House officials deemed the process - which involves interviews, and a review of financial records, past employment, and other potential security risks - too intrusive.

https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2025-03-13/white-house-transfers-fbi-senior-staff-background-checks-to-pentagon-abc-news-reports

Specific proteins are linked to immunotherapy resistance in metastatic colorectal cancer

 A discovery by Mayo Clinic researchers may help explain why immunotherapy hasn't been helpful for many patients with metastatic colorectal cancer. In findings published in Clinical Cancer Research, the team identified specific proteins—fibronectin and smooth muscle actin—within colorectal cancer tissues that are associated with resistance to immunotherapy treatment.

Immunotherapy is a major advance in treating cancer, but many patients, including those with metastatic colorectal cancer, do not respond to it. Until now, researchers have not known why.

"We need predictive biomarkers to guide the selection of immunotherapy for patients," says medical oncologist and gastroenterologist Frank Sinicrope, M.D., the senior author of the study. "Identifying those who may have resistance to treatment can be useful, because then we can spare them from receiving treatment that may not be beneficial and could produce significant toxicities."

The research team used digital spatial profiling, an advanced technology that simultaneously analyzes the expression of multiple proteins and where they are located within tissues. This approach allowed researchers to zoom in to get a bird's eye view of a tumor that includes proteins both within and surrounding the tumor cells and how they interact.

Dr. Sinicrope compares the spatial tools to an aerial view of a neighborhood where one can see relationships between driveways, houses, yards and neighboring structures. Similarly, this detailed view provides physicians and researchers with critical information about the proteins in and around a patient's cancer, potentially informing the best treatment for the patient.

"We wanted to learn more about the patients who did not respond to immunotherapy. We investigated the leading edge of the tumor where cancer cells are invading and where the immune system is attempting to fight the cancer," says Dr. Sinicrope. "It's like a battle going on here and we're getting a snapshot into who is in attendance."

The researchers focused on 10 regions at the invasive margin of a tumor. They applied digital spatial profiling to investigate 71 distinct proteins in both the tumor's epithelial compartment and the surrounding stromal compartment. Fibronectin and smooth muscle actin are two extracellular matrix proteins that were found in the epithelial region of the tumor and were associated with resistance to immunotherapy and shorter time before disease progression.

Upon further analysis, the researchers observed that cancer-associated fibroblasts were producing these proteins. The evidence, they say, suggests that these proteins can contribute to suppression of the anti-tumor immune response.

The discovery offers a step toward more personalized and effective colorectal cancer treatments.

More information: Bahar Saberzadeh-Ardestani et al, Spatially resolved, multi-region proteomics for prediction of immunotherapy outcome in deficient mismatch repair metastatic colorectal cancer, Clinical Cancer Research (2025). DOI: 10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-24-0853

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-03-specific-proteins-linked-immunotherapy-resistance.html

Repurposed FDA-approved drug could help treat high-grade glioma

High-grade glioma, an aggressive form of pediatric and adult brain cancer, is challenging to treat given the tumor location, incidence of recurrence and difficulty for drugs to cross the blood-brain barrier.

Researchers from the University of Michigan, Dana Farber Cancer Institute and the Medical University of Vienna established a collaborative team to uncover a potential new avenue to address this disease.

The team's study, published in Cancer Cell, shows that high-grade glioma tumor cells harboring DNA alterations in the gene PDGFRA responded to the drug avapritinib, which is already approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration to treat gastrointestinal stromal tumors with a PDGFRA exon 18 mutation as well advanced systemic mastocytosis and indolent systemic mastocytosis.

"We were excited to see that avapritinib essentially shut off PDGFRA signaling in mouse brain tumors," said Carl Koschmann, M.D., ChadTough Defeat DIPG Research Professor and clinical scientific director of the Chad Carr Pediatric Brain Tumor Center at C.S. Mott Children's Hospital.

Aside from surgery and radiation, there aren't effective drugs to treat high-grade gliomas, especially upon recurrence. Koschmann and his collaborators targeted PDGFRA, which is one of the most commonly mutated genes, as a potential inroad to discover new drug therapies.

"We'd been doing screens with a lot of commercially available drugs that inhibit PDGFRA. We found avapritinib to be the strongest and most focused inhibitor that targets PDGFRA alterations," Koschmann said.

Along with colleagues from the labs of Mariella Filbin MD, Ph.D. (Dana Farber Cancer Institute) and Johannes Gojo (Medical University of Vienna), who were investigating the effectiveness of PDGFRA inhibitors, Koschmann and his team were excited to see that avapritinib crosses the blood–brain barrier, a normally high hurdle for drugs.

"When we gave mice the drug and showed that it reached the brain, we knew we were onto something," explained Kallen Schwark, a U-M M.D./Ph.D. student and one of the study's lead authors.

The team was able to treat some patients with high-grade glioma through an expanded access program established by Blueprint, while a clinical trial was not yet available.

"Across multiple international institutions, we treated the first eight patients with high-grade glioma with avapritinib," Koschmann explained. "The patients tolerated the drug well and in three of the eight patients, we were able to see their tumors shrink."

This early data and preclinical data helped provide the basis to include pediatric high-grade glioma in a phase I pediatric solid tumor trial, which recently completed accrual, and for which analysis is underway.

"We have very few examples of drugs entering brain tumors like this and shutting down key oncogenic pathways. These results support a lot of ongoing efforts to build on the success of avapritinib and other brain-penetrant small molecule inhibitors," Koschmann continued.

High-grade gliomas are very aggressive, with a prognosis of less than two years and limited treatment options. Though this work is preliminary, Koschmann is hopeful that avapritinib could be an additional tool to help patients.

"We know a single drug is not going to be enough for this disease," he said.

"The way to make true progress will be combining many different types of modalities, like combining drugs that are target pathways activated by the first drug. We already have a follow-up story on targeting avapritinib with MAP kinase inhibitors that we are just as excited about."

More information: Lisa Mayr et al, Effective targeting of PDGFRA-altered high-grade glioma with avapritinib, Cancer Cell (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.ccell.2025.02.018

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-03-repurposed-fda-drug-high-grade.html

Researchers develop method to identify dormant cells that carry HIV

 Mount Sinai researchers have developed a method to uncover the hidden immune cells that harbor the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a discovery that brings medical experts one step closer to a cure for the infection affecting nearly 40 million people globally. The findings were published in Nature Communications.

HIV is a virus that attacks cells in the body fighting off infections, thus weakening the immune system. Antiretroviral therapies can treat the HIV infection by halting the spread of the virus and protecting the immune system, but do not cure the virus. Mount Sinai researchers have developed a method to genetically mark immune cells that carry HIV, an important milestone that could potentially lead to approaches that eliminate the dormant HIV-infected cells and cure the virus.

The team created a novel cell lineage-tracing model to reveal where the virus hides, and developed genetic profiles of T cells, or white blood cells that are crucial to immune response and retain either active or inactive HIV. The researchers said their genetic analysis of the dormant HIV-infected cells provides a new gene pathway for potential treatment.

"The main obstacle to cure the infection is that the virus hides in immune cells that are difficult to identify and study. If we can identify the cells infected with HIV, it will help bring us closer to figuring out how to eliminate them," said corresponding author Benjamin K. Chen, MD, Ph.D., Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases), Microbiology, Pharmacological Sciences, and Immunology and Immunotherapy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

The researchers developed a genetic system to mark HIV-infected cells and then study both infected and dormant cell populations. They used humanized mice models to develop a fluorescent red-to-green switch triggered by the HIV infection that persists even if the virus is dormant. This switch results in the permanent marking of HIV-infected cells in mice and enables lineage tracing of the HIV infection.

The research team profiled more than 47,000 T cells including acutely infected, treated, and uninfected cells, to then identify helper T cells (which detect infections), memory cells, naïve cells (which fight off infections), proliferating cells, regulatory T cells, and subsets within these larger groups. Through their analysis, they predicted and identified nine distinct types of T cells that housed inactive HIV cells. Their investigation also identified persistent T cells with HIV even after 10 and 29 days of antiretroviral therapies.

The findings suggest new therapies that target the reservoir of dormant HIV-infected cells as a potential cure for the virus. The Mount Sinai team will next study and test specific approaches to reactivate dormant HIV and determine if it is possible to reduce the reservoir of infected cells.

More information: Namita Satija et al, Tracking HIV persistence across T cell lineages during early ART-treated HIV-1-infection using a reservoir-marking humanized mouse model, Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-57368-7

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-03-method-dormant-cells-hiv.html