Business Concentrates MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS
▸ Warren Buffett invests in Lanxess Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company run by famed investor Warren Buffett, has acquired a 3% stake in specialty chemical producer Lanxess for $208 million. News of the purchase boosted Lanxess’s share price by about 10%. Berkshire’s investment appears to endorse Lanxess’s strategy to reduce costs, off-load commodity chemicals, and expand into specialties. Lanxess sold half its rubber business to Saudi Aramco for $1.3 billion in 2015 and acquired Chemtura for $2.5 billion last year. Buffett has a fondness for the chemical industry. Berkshire owns the chemical maker Lubrizol and for eight years owned $3 billion in preferred Dow Chemical shares.—ALEX SCOTT
INVESTMENT
▸ Evonik and Wacker invest in start-up fund
PPG drops AkzoNobel bid PPG Industries has withdrawn its $28.8 billion bid to purchase Dutch paint rival AkzoNobel. The bid represented a premium of 50% over AkzoNobel’s stock price in March, before the overture was announced. Many AkzoNobel shareholders, including activist investor Elliott Advisors, wanted AkzoNobel to negotiate, but the company refused. It instead rolled out a plan to spin off its chemicals business within the next year. Last week, PPG’s campaign suffered two fatal setbacks. The Dutch financial market authority wouldn’t extend PPG’s deadline to make a tender offer for AkzoNobel past June 1. Separately, a Dutch appeals court ruled against Elliott in its bid to unseat AkzoNobel chairperson Antony Burgmans. Elliott wanted the court to let shareholders vote on whether to remove Burgmans after AkzoNobel’s board blocked the vote.—ALEX TULLO
for methanol-to-olefins catalysts at the same site.—JEAN-FRANÇOIS TREMBLAY
OUTSOURCING
▸ BioVectra to add capacity with new Nova Scotia plant
Evonik Industries and Wacker Chemie are among the investors in a $335 million fund intended to finance young start-up firms. Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs & Energy and the German staterun KfW Development Bank are the main investors in High-Tech Gründerfonds III, which will also help the start-ups put their business concepts into practice. Evonik expects the investment will help it identify new technology as it develops. Wacker sees the investment as a way to support creative ideas.—MARC REISCH
BioVectra, a Canadian contract R&D firm, is spending $22 million to overhaul a site in Nova Scotia it acquired from Sepracor in 2014. The investment, which will increase BioVectra’s manufacturing capacity by 40%, includes new microbial fermentation and complex chemistry capabilities. The site will be fully operational by the end of the year. BioVectra is owned by Mallinckrodt, which purchased the Canadian company with the acquisition of Questcor, also in 2014. BioVectra operates three other facilities in Canada’s Prince Edward Island.—RICK MULLIN
PROCESS CHEMISTRY
AWARDS
▸ UOP partners up, grows China R&D
▸ SCI hails Weber and Keefe as medalists
Honeywell’s UOP unit has teamed up with China’s Wison Engineering to market UOP’s methanol-to-olefins process outside China. Wison provided engineering services for seven of the nine plants that use the technology in China. Wison will now help market it in Russia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Separately, UOP says it will open, in 2020, an R&D center employing 150 people in Zhangjiagang, near Shanghai. The company is building a plant
The Society of Chemical Industry, America Section, says Ann E. Weber will receive the 2017 Perkin Medal and Melinda H. Keefe the Gordon E. Moore Medal, both on Sept. 12 in Philadelphia. Weber, senior vice president at the New York City-based biotech firm Kallyope, will receive her award for work leading to the development of Januvia and Janumet to treat type 2 diabetes. Keefe, senior R&D manager for architectural coatings at Dow Chemical, will be recognized for leading a
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Weber
Keefe
team at Dow that developed Evoque paint film technology.—MARC REISCH
OUTSOURCING
▸ Cambrex expands its Swedish plant Cambrex is expanding its large-scale active pharmaceutical ingredient operation in Karlskoga, Sweden, introducing continuous-flow production of high-purity drug intermediates. The expansion will also add multipurpose batch reactors ranging from 4 to 12 m3, a 9-m3 hydrogenation reactor, and an upgraded control room. Work on the project is set to be completed later this year.—RICK MULLIN
Cambrex is expanding this facility in Karlskoga, Sweden.
CREDIT: PRNEWSFOTO/SCI AMERICA (WEBER, KEEFE); CAMBREX (FACILITY)
FINANCE
NUCLEIC ACIDS
BIOSIMILARS
▸ Japanese companies advance microwaves
▸ Cipla seeks partner for business
Two Japanese firms, PeptiDream and Microwave Chemical, are joining to develop a process for low-cost mass production of peptides with the aid of microwaves. The two companies say they have produced peptides in small quantities but don’t yet fully understand how the microwave process functions. PeptiDream develops libraries of peptides that it tests against disease targets to find hits. Microwave Chemical specializes in scaling up the use of microwaves for chemical production.—JEAN-
The Indian drug producer Cipla is hoping to find a partner or buyer for its biosimilars business. Cipla’s strength is in small-molecule chemistry, not biologic drugs, a company executive tells C&EN. The biosimilars business operates a plant and R&D center in Goa on India’s west coast. Cipla has developed biosimilars of Genentech’s cancer drugs Avastin and Herceptin but has not launched them in regulated markets. The company’s decision comes a few weeks after Merck KGaA agreed to sell its biosimilars business to Fresenius.—JEAN-FRANÇOIS TREMBLAY
FRANÇOIS TREMBLAY
BIOLOGICS
▸ Merck will boost production in Ireland Merck & Co. will spend $315 million over the next three years to boost drug and vaccine production at facilities in Counties Carlow and Cork, Ireland. The investment is expected to create 200 jobs at the Cork plant. There, Merck specializes in fermentation, purification, and sterilization of biologic medicines for lung cancer, melanoma, hepatitis C, and arthritis. The Carlow facility, which makes vaccines and biologics, will take on 120 new employees.—RICK MULLIN
ONCOLOGY
▸ Array licenses cancer compounds to Ono Array BioPharma has licensed Japan’s Ono Pharmaceutical the right to develop two late-stage oncology compounds, binimetinib and encorafenib, in Japan and South Korea. Array will get $32 million up
Br
BIOTECHNOLOGY
Attempting to right its financial course, ImmunoGen has handed over rights to several compounds to Sanofi in exchange for $30 million. The deal amends a long-running collaboration with Sanofi, which gains a license to assets including isatuximab, an antibody in Phase III studies for multiple myeloma, and SAR566658, an antibody-drug conjugate in Phase II trials for breast cancer. Last month, Im-
▸ Eastman Chemical will spend $12 million to expand window and paint protection film capacity at a plant in Martinsville, Va. The enlargement will create 15 new jobs.
since October 2016. The start-up also says it has completed a successful test in Silsbee, Texas, of its biomass-based aromatics production process.
▸ Croda is building a $35 million plant in Hull, England, that will almost double its capacity for fatty acid amide-based polymer additives. The additives address issues such as friction, scratch resistance, and stability in plastics.
▸ Waters Corp. and Wyatt Technology have entered a comarketing agreement that couples a Wyatt multiangle light-scattering detector with Waters’s ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography system. Customers will be able to determine the properties of polymers, peptides, and proteins without relying only on column calibration or reference standards, they say.
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▸ ImmunoGen hands drug rights to Sanofi
Business Roundup
▸ Anellotech says it has raised $800,000 from an undisclosed investor, bringing its funding to $3.2 million
munoGen took in another $30 million after Debiopharm bought the rights to IMGN529, an ADC in early-stage studies for B-cell cancers. Last September, ImmunoGen laid off 17% of its staff in an effort to save cash.—LISA JARVIS
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Binimetinib front and up to $156 million in milestone payments. The compounds are in Phase III studies of patients with BRAF-mutant cancers. Array recently struck a deal to assess binimetinib with two Bristol-Myers Squibb immuno-oncology agents.—
MICHAEL MCCOY
▸ Eisai and Charles River Laboratories have extended a drug discovery pact focused on tropical and neurological diseases. The partners, which work out of Eisai’s research center in Hatfield, England, will now also collaborate with Medicines for Malaria Venture scientists. ▸ Aslan Pharmaceuticals has raised $33 million from its initial public stock offering. The Singapore-based company, which focuses on treatments for tumors that are prevalent in Asia, has one drug candidate in clinical trials in the U.S. ▸ Inthera Bioscience has raised close to $11 million
in its first round of venture capital funding, led by Merck Ventures. The Swiss firm is developing cancer treatments based on small-molecule inhibitors of intracellular protein-protein interactions. ▸ The Global Health Innovative Technology Fund has raised about $200 million from the Japanese government, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and other organizations to develop drugs for diseases prevalent in developing countries. Launched in 2013 with $100 million, the Japanese fund supports 61 projects, including six undergoing clinical trials.
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