BUSI NESS CONCENTRATES
INDONESIAN FIRMS PLAN TO COMBINE Indonesia’s sole ethylene producer, Chandra Asri, plans to merge with Tri Polyta Indonesia, a polypropylene maker listed on the Indonesian stock exchange. After the merger by exchange of shares, privately held Chandra Asri will become a publicly held concern. Both companies are controlled by Barito Pacific, one of Indonesia’s largest conglomerates. Chandra Asri’s main asset is a 600,000-metric-ton-per-year cracker that came on-line in 1995. With combined annual sales of about $1.6 billion, the merged company will be one of the largest petrochemical makers in Southeast Asia, the two firms say, with improved vertical integration. Chandra Asri is already Tri Polyta’s main supplier of propylene.—JFT
SANOFI TO SELL EUROPEAN R&D FACILITIES TO COVANCE Sanofi-Aventis has become the latest drug company to sell R&D facilities to a service firm. In an agreement worth up to $2.2 billion, the French pharmaceutical giant will sell its Porcheville, France, and Alnwick, England, sites to the drug development services company Covance for about $25 million. Covance says it will keep the combined 300 employees at these sites for at least the next five years. Over the next 10 years, Covance expects to provide drug development services to Sanofi, receiving total payments ranging between $1.2 billion and $2.2 billion. “This alliance with Covance will help us preserve hundreds of valuable jobs in Porcheville and Alnwick, while driving our R&D efficiency,” Sanofi R&D head Marc Cluzel says. In 2008, Covance struck a similar agreement with Eli Lilly & Co., taking over the drug company’s site in Greenfield, Ind. That deal came with a 10-year contract worth $1.6 billion. In recent months, GlaxoSmithKline has sold European R&D sites to Aptuit and Galapagos, both drug development services firms.—MM
BASF will build facilities in Nanjing, China, to produce chemicals used in water treatment and paper manufacturing. The plants will consist of a 40,000-metric-ton-peryear quaternized cationic monomers unit and a downstream 20,000-metric-ton cationic polyacrylamide plant. The polymers can be used as flocculants in municipal water treatment or as retention aids in paper plants. Although the facilities will be physically integrated with the BASFSinopec joint venture in Nanjing, they will be owned 100% by BASF. Separately, BASF will set up its fourth Chinese polyurethane systems facility, in Tianjin in northeast China.—JFT
DSM EXITS CITRIC ACID, LINKS WITH DUPONT DSM will sell Citrique Belge, its Belgiumbased citric acid subsidiary, to privately held Adcuram for an undisclosed price. Citrique Belge, with 250 employees, had sales in 2009 of more than $135 million and a loss of more than $50 million. DSM decided in 2007 that citric acid did not fit its long-term plans. Separately, DSM has formed a joint venture, to be called Actamax Surgical Materials, with DuPont. The partners will develop surgical sealants and tissue adhesives based on DuPont hydrogel technology and DSM medical polymer manufacturing capabilities.—MSR
SIGNA CHEMISTRY
BASF ADDS TREATMENT CHEMICALS IN CHINA
incorporate new comonomers such as hexene and make specialty polypropylene grades for pipe, film, health care, and other applications. Capacity at the plant will expand by 50,000 metric tons to 235,000 metric tons per year.—AHT
BASF EXPLAINS POTATO COMMINGLING
SIGNA TECHNOLOGY POWERS ELECTRIC BIKE SiGNa Chemistry, a developer of reagents and catalysts intended to make reactive metals safer and more efficient, has teamed up with Pedego Electric Bikes on a range extender for Pedego’s battery-powered bicycles. SiGNa provides cartridges in which sodium silicide and water react to form hydrogen, which powers a proton exchange membrane fuel cell. The resulting electricity triples the bicycle’s operating range, the partners say.—MM
LYONDELLBASELL BULKS UP IN BRINDISI LyondellBasell is extending technology capabilities and expanding capacity for its Spherizone polypropylene process plant in Brindisi, Italy. By 2012, the company plans to upgrade the design of the plant so it can WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG
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OCTOBER 4, 2010
BASF Plant Science has identified how its Amadea potato ended up in Swedish fields with its Amflora potato. Although both are genetically engineered to produce amylopectin starch for the paper, adhesive, and food industries, only Amflora has regulatory approval. The problem arose when both plants were cultivated in the same facilities during early seed propagation. Although the event is limited to Sweden, BASF has informed regulators in all countries where the potatoes are being grown. To avoid any future problems, BASF will produce approved and unapproved potatoes separately, analyze all plants before planting, and develop further controls with regulators.—AMT
DOW DEBUTS NEW ROOF COATING SYSTEM Dow Chemical has launched a new acrylic coatings resin, Rhoplex EC-3100, to protect difficult-to-coat thermoplastic polyolefin (TPO) roof membranes. The technology combines acrylic expertise obtained in the 2009 acquisition of Rohm and Haas
DOW
BUSI NESS CONCENTRATES
vibrational optical activity measurements, computational modeling, consulting, and education workshops.—AMT
ENDO BUYS QUALITEST IN GENERICS DEAL
with nonacrylic know-how A worker applies heatfrom Dow, says Joseph M. reflective Rokowski, a Dow research roof coating. scientist. The white-pigmented coating can extend the life of TPO membranes, which help keep buildings cool.—MSR
Endo Pharmaceuticals has agreed to acquire the generic drug maker Qualitest Pharmaceuticals for $1.2 billion. Endo was formed in 1997 out of DuPont Merck’s generic drugs business. It has made several recent acquisitions, including the purchase of Indevus Pharmaceuticals and of drug delivery specialist Penwest Pharmaceuticals. Qualitest, owned by the investment firm Apax Partners, calls itself the sixth-largest generics company in the U.S. Its roughly $350 million in annual sales will increase Endo’s sales to about $2 billion.—MM
BELGIAN CHIRALITY CENTER ESTABLISHED
LUNDBECK CUTS JOBS, SEEKS EXTERNAL R&D
Ghent University, the University of Antwerp, and instrumentation provider BioTools have created the European Centre for Chirality. Scheduled to open on Dec. 2 in Ghent and Antwerp, Belgium, EC2 is designed to help academic and industrial scientists develop applications and advance their understanding of the role chirality plays in biological processes and drug R&D. The center will offer expertise including absolute chiral configuration determinations,
Danish drugmaker H. Lundbeck will eliminate a total of 50 positions at its research centers in Denmark and the U.S. as part of a refocusing of its R&D strategy. The company, which specializes in brain diseases, says its research will increasingly be based on the relationship between the biology of a disease and its symptoms. It adds that partnerships with universities and other companies, already important, will receive even higher priority in the future.—MM
BUSINESS ROUNDUP BRASKEM plans to invest, through 2011, $50 million in the U.S. polypropylene business it purchased from Sunoco earlier this year. Manufacturing assets will get $35 million of the funds. In particular, the firm will invest $15 million in La Porte, Texas, to idle a slurry technology line and expand a Spheripol process unit. ARKEMA plans to build a $30 million acrylic emulsion polymers plant in Changshu, China, to supply coatings and
adhesives customers starting in late 2012. The firm says it is on track to start up a polyvinylidene fluoride plant, also in Changshu, to supply high-performance coatings customers beginning early next year. CABOT Microelectronics has signed a nonbinding agreement with South Korea’s Gyeonggi province to set up R&D and manufacturing facilities there. Cabot Micro, the world’s largest supplier of chemical mechanical planarization slurries for semiconductor production, says it could invest $10 million.
INNOPHOS HOLDINGS will spend $4.5 million to double capacity in Nashville, Tenn., for its calcium phosphate leavening agents. To be completed by mid-2011, the project is aimed at food industry customers that want to reduce sodium levels in their products, Innophos says. JSR will spend $7 million to set up an R&D facility for liquid-crystal-display materials in South Korea, which is home to the world’s largest LCD producers. Fitted with a clean room and a range of evaluation instruments, the facility will be operational in July 2011, JSR says.
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SANOFI-AVENTIS STRIKES TWO DEALS Sanofi-Aventis and its Sanofi Pasteur vaccines division will work with the German biotech firm Pieris. The goal is to develop drug candidates from Pieris’ library of low-molecular-weight proteins, called anticalins, against at least two disease targets. Sanofi will pay $4.8 million up front, as well as provide R&D funding and milestone payments. For each resulting product, Pieris could receive up to $60 million. Separately, Sanofi Pasteur will acquire Orlando, Fla.based VaxDesign for $55 million. Initially supported by government defense funding, VaxDesign has developed in vitro models of the human immune system that can be used instead of animal models.—AMT
ABBOTT LICENSES KIDNEY DISEASE DRUG Abbott Laboratories has agreed to pay $450 million for the right to sell Reata Pharmaceuticals’ bardoxolone outside the U.S. Bardoxolone is an oral antioxidant inflammatory modulator that turns on Nrf2, a protein that dictates the production of antioxidant and detoxification enzymes. The drug candidate has shown promise in two Phase II trials for chronic kidney disease, a condition affecting 30–40% of people with type 2 diabetes. The Abbott deal excludes some Asian markets, for which Kyowa Hakko Kirin has already licensed the drug.—LJ
LG CHEM will build facilities in South Korea to produce acrylates and superabsorbent polymers, both acrylic acid derivatives. The plants will cost a total of $267 million, the Korean firm says. ZEOLYST International, a joint venture of PQ Corp. and a Shell subsidiary, is doubling the capacity of its zeolite facility in Kansas City, Kan. Much of the new capacity is for specialty zeolites used in selective catalytic reduction for diesel emission control, the firm says. THERMO FISHER Scientific and Proteome
OCTOBER 4, 2010
Sciences will collaborate to advance protein biomarker research. Under the pact, Proteome Sciences will combine its proprietary mass tag technology for biomarker discovery, qualification, and assay validation with Thermo’s mass spectrometry technology. PALATIN Technologies is cutting half its workforce, or about 20 people, and ending discovery-phase research in order to focus on its lead drug candidates. The biotech firm plans to move its sexual dysfunction compound bremelanotide into Phase II trials in early 2011.
