Business Concentrates MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS
▸ Shell green lights Pennsylvania cracker Shell Chemicals is moving forward with plans to build an ethylene cracker and polyethylene complex in Monaca, Pa., an Ohio River town about 50 km from Pittsburgh. The facility will have about 1.6 million metric tons of polyethylene capacity per year. Shell expects construction to begin within the next 18 months, with operations to start up early in the next decade. Most of the dozen cracker complexes that the petrochemical industry is planning to take advantage of low-cost shale-based gas are to be located on the Gulf Coast. However, Shell says this plant will have easy access to nearby shale deposits. Moreover, the company says, 70% of North American polyethylene customers are located within a 1,200-km radius of Pittsburgh.—ALEX TULLO
SPECIALTY CHEMICALS
▸ BASF to expand coatings resins BASF will expand capacity for its Laromer line of ultraviolet- and electron-beam-curable acrylate resins at its Ludwigshafen, Germany, site by the third quarter of this year. The company says the investment is meant to meet growing demand for the energy curable Radiant-energy- products, used in applications such as cured coatings flooring and furniture are gaining coatings.—ALEX acceptance for
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C&EN | CEN.ACS.ORG | JUNE 13, 2016
Lotte enters a bid for Axiall Vinyl products maker Axiall has a new bidder, Lotte Chemical, a South Korean petrochemical maker that is also Axiall’s partner in an ethylene project planned for Lake Charles, La. The unsolicited bid, reportedly for more than $2.6 billion, was disclosed in a regulatory filing in Seoul, South Korea, and inserts Lotte in the battle for control of the Atlanta-based firm. Westlake Chemical, whose latest $3.1 billion bid Axiall has already turned down as inadequate, is waging a proxy battle to replace Axiall directors at the latter’s June 17 shareholder meeting. In a filing with U.S. authorities, Axiall CEO Timothy Mann Jr. says his firm “has not made any decisions concerning the Lotte offer.”—MARC REISCH
AGRICULTURE
BIG DATA
▸ Sumitomo buys into Indian producer
▸ Bayer makes deal for space data
Sumitomo Chemical is acquiring a stake as high as 75% in Excel Crop Care, India’s fifth-largest agrochemical firm. The Japanese company has already agreed with Excel’s founders and other investors to buy at least 45% of the company. The Indian agrochemical market is the world’s ninth largest and is growing at a rate of 6.4% per year. With headquarters in Mumbai, Excel manufactures and sells a range of agrochemicals. The Japanese producer hopes to use Excel’s distribution channels to boost sales of its agrochemicals in India.—JEAN-
Bayer has signed an agreement with the start-up Planetary Planetary Resources to deResources’ velop crop science constellation of applications and Ceres satellites products on the bawill be in place in sis of satellite imaglate 2018. es. Planetary is best known for its longterm business strategy to mine asteroids for valuable metals, but in the near term, it is launching a system of Earth-observing satellites called Ceres. The satellites will provide thermal and hyperspectral data from more than 40 color bands that, when combined with Bayer tools, will allow farmers to time irrigation, get planting date recommendations, and assess the water-holding capacity of soil.—MELODY BOMGARDNER
FRANÇOIS TREMBLAY
PETROCHEMICALS
▸ Costs increase for Sasol project After a review of the project, Sasol now estimates that the cost of its ethylene cracker and derivatives complex in Lake Charles, La., currently under construction, will reach $11 billion. Earlier estimates put the price closer to $9 billion. The complex will have an ethylene cracker with about 1.5 million metric tons of annual capacity as well as polyethylene, ethylene glycol, alcohol, ethoxylate, and other downstream units. The company blames the increase on escalating labor, contract, and bulk materials costs. It has already spent $4.5 billion on the project, which is more than 40% complete. The company expects to start up the facility in 2018 and 2019.—ALEX TULLO
INORGANIC CHEMICALS
▸ SQM will boost potassium nitrate SQM will increase its potassium nitrate capacity by 50% to 1.5 million metric tons per year by mid-2018. The Chilean firm says it will build a 300,000-metric-ton-per-year plant in Pedro de Valdivia, Chile, that will react potassium and nitrate salts. The balance of the capacity increase will come from expansion of existing facilities. SQM says the new capacity will serve the specialty fertilizer market as well as operators of concentrated solar power plants, which use molten potassium nitrate and sodium nitrate to transfer and store heat.—MICHAEL MCCOY
CREDIT: BASF (LIVING ROOM); PLANETARY RESOURCES (SATELLITE)
PETROCHEMICALS
START-UPS
Ultragenyx will get an exclusive license to develop a preclinical candidate from Takeda for a specific genetic disease. Under a five-year collaboration, Ultragenyx will have the option to license up to five more Takeda compounds.—ANN THAYER
▸ Ixaltis gets funds to repurpose drug Ixaltis, a start-up company focused on urogenital disorders, has raised $9 million in its first funding round. The French firm’s pipeline consists of three NH compounds licensed from Sanofi. The most O advanced is litoxetine, a serotonin reuptake Litoxetine inhibitor and 5-HT3 receptor antagonist that Sanofi had studied as an antidepressant. Ixaltis will soon begin testing the compound in a Phase II trial for treating urinary incontinence. The company also received a $3.2 million loan under an academic-industrial research project dedicated to urogenital diseases.—ANN THAYER
DRUG DISCOVERY
▸ Takeda puts money in rare disease firm Takeda Pharmaceutical is investing $15 million in cash and purchasing $25 million worth of stock in Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical. Within 12 months, the Japanese company will have the option to purchase $25 million more of the rare disease firm’s stock.
START-UPS
▸ New York City gets biotech incubator
DRUG DEVELOPMENT Alexandria Real Estate Equities is building what it calls a first-of-its-kind biotech incubator in New York City. Alexandria LaunchLabs will open in 2017 with more than 1,400 m2 of lab and office space at the Alexandria Center for Life Science on Manhattan’s East Side. At the same time, Alexandria is forming a seed capital fund that will make up to $25 million available to companies that emerge from New York City’s academic labs. Tenants of LaunchLabs will have priority access to funds.—MICHAEL MCCOY
INVESTMENT
▸ Merck expands its venture fund Merck KGaA has doubled the size of its existing corporate venture fund and ex-
Business Roundup ▸ Italmatch Chemicals, an Italian chemical maker, has acquired Compass Chemical, a Smyrna, Ga.-based maker of organophosphonates and other chemicals for water treatment and oil and gas applications, from the private equity firm One Rock Capital Partners. The deal follows Italmatch’s purchase earlier this year of a similar Solvay business and its 2013 buy of phosphonates assets from Thermphos International. ▸ Stepan will expand its polyester polyol plant in Brzeg Dolny, Poland, by adding a new reactor. The company says it has also relocated its European R&D and
panded it beyond the biopharmaceutical area, to cover all three of the company’s businesses. Now worth up to $340 million, Merck Ventures will have teams dedicated to investing in the health care, life sciences, and performance materials areas as well as in entirely new businesses. The teams can participate in seed-stage company startup, early-stage syndicated investments, and Merck spin-off creation and funding.—ANN THAYER
technical service center to new laboratories in Wrocław, Poland. ▸ BASF has postponed a final investment decision for its proposed methane-to-propylene plant in Freeport, Texas, because of volatile raw material prices. The company says it will continue to keep an eye on market conditions in case it wants to resuscitate the project. ▸ Cargill has received a socalled no-objection letter from FDA, allowing it to market a new form of stevia sweetener as “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS. The company worked with
▸ Microbiome firms gain partners, raise money Seres Therapeutics will collaborate with the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Individualized Medicine to develop microbiome-based therapeutics for liver diseases. The partners will look for treatments for primary sclerosing cholangitis, a bile duct disorder, and study the role of the microbiome in nonalcoholic steatohepatitis. Separately, Vedanta Biosciences, another firm trying to develop therapeutics to modulate the microbiome, has raised $50 million. The funding round, which will support several clinical studies, was led by PureTech, Rock Springs Capital, Invesco Asset Management, and Health for Life Capital.—LISA JARVIS
Evolva to develop a route to make two steviol glycosides, called rebaudioside M and D, via fermentation from sugar rather than by extracting the relatively rare compounds from the stevia plant. ▸ Grodno Azot, a stateowned enterprise in Grodno, Belarus, was the scene of a deadly accident last week. There, two workers were killed after inhaling fumes from a smoky fire at a nitrogen fertilizer plant. ▸ 5AM Venture Management has raised $285 million for a life sciences venture capital fund. The money will finance early-stage companies developing drugs, drug delivery technology, instrumentation, and reagents.
▸ Amyris has signed a research agreement with Janssen Biotech, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, to use the Amyris technology platform to develop a library of natural and natural-like compounds. Researchers will test the compounds’ efficacy against a target identified by Janssen using in vivo testing. ▸ Takeda Pharmaceutical has teamed with Roivant Sciences to form Myovant Sciences. Myovant has been granted the rights to Takeda’s relugolix, currently in late-stage studies for the treatment of uterine fibroids, endometriosis, and prostate cancer, as well as TAK-448 for the treatment of infertility in women.
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