Business Concentrates BIOBASED CHEMICALS
▸ Air Products details bid for China’s Yingde Air Products & Chemicals is willing to pay more than $1.3 billion to acquire the Chinese industrial gas firm Yingde Gases. Air Products CEO Seifi Ghasemi elaborated on the offer in a letter to Yingde’s board. The offer represents a 92% premium over Yingde’s share price in December, before Air Products indicated its interest in buying the company. Yingde had 2015 sales of about $1.1 billion and operating profits of nearly $300 million.—ALEX TULLO
PETROCHEMICALS
▸ Lotte bids for Jurong Aromatics Lotte Chemical, of South Korea, has put in a bid for Jurong Aromatics, a troubled Singapore-based petrochemical producer. In a statement, Lotte said it had sent a letter of intent to Jurong. Built at a cost of $2.4 billion, the aromatics complex features an 800,000-metric-ton-per-year p-xylene plant. The firm started production in August 2014 but went into receivership one year later because of operational problems, according to a law firm advising the receivers. Jurong is owned by a consortium that includes SK Energy, Jiangsu Sanfanxiang, Glencore, and the Singapore government.—JEAN-FRANÇOIS TREMBLAY
PETROCHEMICALS
▸ LyondellBasell completes major ethylene expansion LyondellBasell has completed a 360,000-metric-ton-per-year expansion of ethylene capacity at its Corpus Christi, Texas, complex. The project expanded capacity for the petrochemical building block at the site by 50% and completes a program to expand capacity by 1.1 million metric tons per year without building a new ethylene cracker as competitors have done. “By expanding ethylene capacity in the U.S. through debottlenecks rather than long and costly greenfield developments,
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C&EN | CEN.ACS.ORG | JANUARY 30, 2017
Ginkgo Bioworks buys DNA supplier Gen9 Synthetic biology firm Ginkgo Bioworks has acquired its DNA supplier, Gen9, for an undisclosed amount. As a result, Gen9’s capabilities for synthesizing large amounts of DNA now directly feed into Ginkgo’s automated organism-engineering foundries. Ginkgo uses the DNA to build customized multigene enzymatic pathways and microbial strains for clients such as Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland that are looking to produce chemicals and ingredients. In 2016, Ginkgo signed DNA supply deals with Gen9 and Twist Bioscience for a combined 600 million base pairs of DNA, an amount expected to be more than half the synthetic DNA market. However, in late 2016, Boston news reports said that Gen9 had put orders on hold and was laying off most of its staff. The companies say remaining Gen9 operations and R&D people will join Ginkgo. And Gen9’s BioFab manufacturing systems, which include proprietary technologies, software, and informatics tools, are being moved into Ginkgo.—ANN THAYER
we quickly added substantial capacity for significantly less than the cost of a new plant,” says Bob Patel, LyondellBasell’s CEO.—ALEX TULLO
MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS
POLLUTION
Oil giant Shell has agreed to sell its 50% stake in Jubail, Saudi Arabia-based Saudi Petrochemical Co. (SADAF) to Saudi Basic Industries, SADAF’s co-owner, for $820 million. SADAF has a total output of more than 4 million metric tons per year of chemical products that include chlorine, ethanol, ethylene, ethylene dichloride, methyl tert-butyl ether, and styrene. The move is driven by Shell’s goal to narrow the range of its chemicals portfolio. The joint venture agreement would have expired in 2020.—ALEX SCOTT
▸ P&G floats bottle made of beach plastic Procter & Gamble has developed a bottle for its Head & Shoulders shampoo that is made of up to 25% recycled plastic collected from beaches. P&G will sell its shampoo in 170,000 of the bottles in France this summer. The waste was collected by thousands of volunteers and hundreds of nongovernmental organizations. P&G developed the packaging in association with Trenton, N.J.-based postconsumer waste recycling firm TerraCycle and French water and waste treatment firm Suez.—ALEX SCOTT
Virginie Helias, vice president of global sustainability at P&G, shows off the new shampoo bottle, made in part from ocean waste.
▸ Shell’s SADAF exit raises $820 million
INVESTMENT
▸ Reliance and Sibur plan second rubber unit Reliance Industries and Sibur have agreed to build a 60,000-metric-ton-per-year halogenated butyl rubber plant at the Reliance refinery and petrochemical complex in Jamnagar, India. The plant will be adjacent to a 120,000-metric-ton butyl rubber unit that the two are already building at the site and which is due to come on-line in 2018. Halogenated butyl rubber is largely used in the production of tubeless tire inner liners. Reliance has a 75% stake in the venture that will operate both rubber plants.—JEAN-
FRANÇOIS TREMBLAY
CREDIT: P&G
ASIA
RENEWABLES
▸ Eastman launches new acetate fiber brand
invest $5 million in green chemistry innovation by 2022. Rival chain Walmart launched a similar policy last July.—MICHAEL MCCOY
OUTSOURCING
Fabric made with Eastman’s Naia fiber.
Eastman Chemical, a maker of cellulose acetate fiber for draperies and bedspreads, has launched a new brand of cellulose acetate filament fiber it has dubbed Naia. Intended for women’s intimate apparel, Eastman says the fiber is made with wood pulp “derived exclusively from sustainably managed and certified forests.”—MARC REISCH
CONSUMER PRODUCTS
▸ Target chain launches chemicals policy The big retailer Target has launched a chemical management policy focused on ingredient transparency and chemicals of concern. By 2020, Target wants full ingredient disclosure for all personal care, baby care, and household products it sells. Those products also must be formulated without phthalates, parabens, formaldehyde, formaldehyde donors, or nonylphenol ethoxylates. By 2022, the chain wants to remove perfluorinated chemicals and harmful flame retardants from all textiles. And Target says it will
▸ IQ-CHem invites ideas on petrochemicals A group of 14 chemical firms have come together to launch IQ-CHem, a competition inviting start-ups to put forward innovative ideas for the petrochemical industry. There is one prize of $20,000, two prizes of $10,000 each, and three prizes of $5,000 each. The application deadline is March 1. IQ-CHem partners include BASF, Dow, Henkel, Sinopec, Solvay, and 3M. The competition will be judged by more than 30 experts representing partner companies, scientific institutions, and investors. In addition to the financial prizes, start-ups with the best proposals will have the chance to collaborate with IQ-CHem partners.—ALEX SCOTT
DRUG DEVELOPMENT
▸ Immunotherapyfocused Cue Biopharma launches Cue Biopharma has emerged from stealth with $26 million in funding to devel-
Business Roundup
CREDIT: EASTMAN CHEMICAL
▸ Versalis, the chemical arm of Italian energy company ENI, and Algerian state oil company Sonatrach have signed an agreement to carry out joint feasibility studies for an integrated chemical complex in Algeria. The two companies signed a cooperation agreement in November. ▸ Trinseo is selling its 50% interest in the Sumika Styron Polycarbonate joint venture to its partner Sumitomo Chemical. Trinseo will continue to market the output of the Ehime, Japan-based polycarbonate plant.
▸ LiquiGlide has raised $16 million in funding in a venture capital round that included Structure Capital, Valia Investments, Struck Capital, and Pilot Grove. The company is based on technology developed at MIT for creating permanently wet and slippery surface coatings. ▸ Intrexon has agreed to acquire the Maryland-based gene therapy company GenVec in a deal worth about $16 million. Intrexon intends to use GenVec’s adenoviral vector gene delivery technology and regulatory compliant manufacturing in developing therapeutics.
op T-cell receptor-targeted biologics. Founded in 2015 with $10 million in seed funding, Cue hopes to tackle cancer and autoimmune diseases by developing biologics that will modulate the activity of specific sets of T cells. By outfitting an antibody with both an engineered T-cell signaling ligand and a peptide complex specific for disease-relevant T cells, Cue can elicit a highly specific response, either stimulating T cells to combat cancer or dampening the T-cell response in autoimmune diseases. The biotech firm has two drug candidates in preclinical studies for cancer.—LISA JARVIS
ONCOLOGY
▸ Merck, BMS settle patent dispute In the latest twist in the heated cancer immunotherapy arena, Merck & Co. has settled its patent dispute with Bristol-Myers Squibb and Ono Pharmaceutical over Merck’s PD1 inhibitor Keytruda. Merck will pay BMS $625 million and provide royalties on global sales of Keytruda through 2026. The deal comes a day after BMS suffered another setback with its PD1 inhibitor, Opdivo. BMS said it was no longer pursuing an accelerated approval of Opdivo combined with cancer immunotherapy agent, Yervoy, as a first-line treatment in lung cancer. In August, Opdivo failed a study as a first-line monotherapy in lung cancer.—LISA JARVIS
▸ Merck KGaA has teamed with Domain Therapeutics to develop adenosine receptor antagonists and other novel cancer immunotherapies. Although financial details have not been disclosed, Merck will provide Domain with research funding in exchange for the global rights to its next-generation adenosine receptor inhibitors.
▸ Enteris BioPharma and Sanofi are exploring the possibility of using Enteris’s small-molecule delivery technology to develop an oral formulation of one of Sanofi’s preclinical-stage peptides. Enteris was set up in 2013 around the drug delivery technology of the now-defunct peptide drug firm Unigene Laboratories.
▸ Aptuit, a contract research provider, is collaborating with the Molecular Surgical Laboratory of Massachusetts General Hospital in the area of antibiotic resistance. Directed by Laurence Rahme, the lab is working to identify and validate new targets in Gram-negative bacteria.
▸ Verily Life Sciences, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is partnering with Singapore-based Temasek. The Asian investment firm will put $800 million into Verily for a minority stake. Verily is a data-focused developer of life sciences and health care tools and devices.
JANUARY 30, 2017 | CEN.ACS.ORG | C&EN
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