Business Concentrates BUSINESS
▸ Europe investigates ethylene market The European Commission says it carried out unannounced inspections on May 16 of European companies that purchase ethylene. The specialty chemical maker Clariant, for example, confirmed that it is under investigation. The EC says it is concerned that the companies might have violated antitrust rules that prohibit cartels and restrictive business practices. Ethylene is a large-volume commodity used to produce polyethylene and many other petrochemicals.—MICHAEL MCCOY
OUTSOURCING
▸ Avantor opens life sciences center Avantor has opened a 2,500-m2 center in Bridgewater, N.J., intended to provide contract research services to pharmaceutical companies. The R&D center includes clean-room facilities, mass spectrometers, bioreactors, particle size analyzers, and more, Avantor says. The center will facilitate reAvantor’s new combinant protein innovation center engineering, prois intended to aid tein expression and drug companies. purification, and trace materials characterization, the firm adds.—MICHAEL MCCOY
BUSINESS
▸ Huntsman launches TiO2 maker Venator Huntsman Corp. has launched the initial public offering of 20% of Venator, its titanium dioxide and performance additives business. The IPO of 22.7 million shares is expected to raise nearly $500 million. Shares of the new firm, trading under the symbol VNTR, will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange in August. The
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C&EN | CEN.ACS.ORG | JULY 31, 2017
AkzoNobel still under attack A package of measures introduced by AkzoNobel to diffuse tension with its largest shareholder, the hedge fund Elliott Advisors, has fallen short. Rather than back off, Elliott is pushing for its legal right to introduce a motion at AkzoNobel’s extraordinary general meeting on Sept. 8 so it can vote for the dismissal of the firm’s chair, Antony Burgmans. Measures introduced by AkzoNobel to improve relations with shareholders include forming a supervisory board committee for shareholder relations and promising more opportunities for investors to meet with senior management. But Elliott remains critical of the Dutch firm’s managers, and Burgmans’s role in particular, for resisting a takeover by U.S. paint rival PPG Industries earlier in the year. Elliott is also unhappy with AkzoNobel’s nomination of Thierry Vanlancker—the firm’s former head of chemicals—as its CEO, after the unexpected resignation of CEO Ton Büchner on July 18.—ALEX SCOTT
launch takes place as prices and demand for TiO2, a pigment widely used in paint, are on the rise after a long period of stagnation. Venator has annual sales of more than $2 billion and accounts for 11% of global TiO2 production.—MARC REISCH
PETROCHEMICALS
▸ Lyondell moves on big Texas project LyondellBasell Industries has green-lighted plans to build in Channelview, Texas, what it says will be the world’s biggest propylene oxide/tert-butyl alcohol (TBA) plant. Expected to cost $2.4 billion, the project is the largest capital investment in Lyondell’s history, the firm says. At a site near Pasadena, Texas, an ethers plant will convert TBA into the fuel oxygenates methyl tert-butyl ether and ethyl tert-butyl ether. Many U.S. states ban the oxygenates because of their potential to contaminate groundwater, but they are widely used in Latin America and Asia.—MICHAEL
sulfuric acid, and other chemicals. H.I.G acquired the business in 2011. Credit rating agency Moody’s says Cornerstone has a good track record and benefits from the recent start-up of a Dyno Nobel ammonia plant on its site. But Cornerstone “will be pressured to find new growth opportunities in the medium term,” Moody’s says.—MARC REISCH
SPECIALTY CHEMICALS
▸ Croda buys up surfactants spin-off
MCCOY
Specialty chemical firm Croda has acquired Enza Biotech, a spin-off from Sweden’s Lund University with a technology for making nonionic sugar-based surfactants from carbohydrates. Enza’s cofounders Maria Andersson and Stefan Ulvenlund and their team will transfer to Croda to commercialize the technology. Enza uses an enzymatic process to generate oligomeric alkylglycosides, which cause less irritation than nonionic surfactants when used in personal care products, Enza claims.—ALEX SCOTT
MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS
POLYMERS
▸ Cornerstone Chemical ▸ P&G recycling changes hands process advances Littlejohn & Co. has reached a deal to buy Cornerstone Chemical, the former basic chemicals business of Cytec Industries, from another private equity firm, H.I.G. Capital. Located in Waggaman, La., Cornerstone makes melamine, acrylonitrile,
Consumer products giant Procter & Gamble has developed a process that restores used polypropylene to like-new resin. The technology removes virtually all contaminants and colors from the cast-off plastic, creating a recycled polymer that is nearly
C R E D I T: AVA NTO R
REGULATION
identical in performance and properties to virgin polypropylene, P&G says. It has licensed the process to the Ohio-based startup firm PureCycle Technologies, which plans to open a pilot plant in January and a full-scale plant in 2020. P&G intends to buy the polypropylene to help it double use of recycled resins in packaging by 2020, but it expects other companies will also purchase the resin.—MARC REISCH
PHARMACEUTICALS
▸ Mitsubishi unit buys Israel’s NeuroDerm Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma, part of Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings, has agreed to buy the Israeli firm NeuroDerm for $1.1 billion. NeuroDerm develops drug-device pairings to treat central nervous system disorders. One of its candidates, ND0612, is undergoing Phase III trials for late-stage Parkinson’s, a point when treatment with oral levodopa no longer works. NeuroDerm’s approach is the continuous subcutaneous O administration HO OH of levodopa via NH2 a small pump HO attached to the Levodopa person’s belt. Mitsubishi Tanabe says the acquisition will help it raise U.S. sales to $715 million by 2020. Next month, the Japanese firm will launch its amyotrophic lateral scle-
rosis drug Radicava in the U.S.—JEAN-
FRANÇOIS TREMBLAY
INFORMATICS
▸ Takeda taps Schrödinger for drug discovery Takeda Pharmaceutical has entered a multitarget research collaboration with Schrödinger, a computational science firm. In an effort led by Schrödinger, the Japanese drug firm will provide protein crystal structures to guide the in silico design of new chemical entities in areas of therapeutic interest. Takeda has the option to license compounds from Schrödinger, paying up to $170 million per compound as well as royalties on future sales.—RICK MULLIN
BIOLOGICS
▸ Lonza invests in modular production The big contract manufacturer Lonza will build facilities at its Visp, Switzerland, headquarters site to house modular biomanufacturing units that will be marketed under the name Ibex Solutions. The first of five planned buildings will house a previously announced joint venture with
Business Roundup
C R E D I T: LO N Z A
▸ Arzeda has raised $12 million in a series A round of funding led by OS Fund. The Seattle-based firm uses computational and synthetic biology to create enzymes and chemicals in “cell factories.” Arzeda says it will use the money to scale up its high-throughput computing and lab screening capacity. ▸ Clariant has joined Kopernikus, a renewable energy initiative of the German government. Clariant catalysts will be used in a storage technology in which hydrogen is chemically bound through
catalytic hydrogenation and then released via catalytic dehydrogenation. ▸ GreenMantra Technologies has raised $3 million from Closed Loop Fund, a social impact investment fund, to help it expand a one-year-old plant in Ontario that converts postconsumer and postindustrial plastics into high-value waxes. The firm expects the project to be complete next year. ▸ Asahi Kasei will boost its capacity in Singapore for solution-polymerized styrene butadiene rubber by 30% to
A rendering of new facilities Lonza plans to build at its Visp, Switzerland, site. Sanofi. Because the firm will build ahead of demand, customers can reduce their time to market for new biologic drugs by 12 months or more, Lonza says. The initiative will create several hundred new jobs, the company adds.—MICHAEL MCCOY
ONCOLOGY
▸ AstraZeneca, Merck form oncology pact AstraZeneca and Merck & Co. will work together to broaden the application of AstraZeneca’s Lynparza, a small-molecule PARP inhibitor approved in 2014 to treat BRCA-mutated ovarian cancer. The two firms will develop Lynparza for other cancers both on its own and in combination with other drugs, including AstraZeneca’s Imfinzi and Merck’s Keytruda, immuno-oncology antibodies known as checkpoint inhibitors. Merck will pay AstraZeneca $1.6 billion up front and up to $6.9 billion more in milestone payments.—MICHAEL MCCOY
130,000 metric tons per year. The company also produces the material, prized in the production of fuel-efficient tires, in Japan. ▸ Astellas is winding down its Agensys research operations in Santa Monica, Calif., as it reduces its focus on antibody-drug conjugate research. The Japanese drug firm acquired Agensys in 2007 for $387 million. ▸ Sanofi has licensed certain of Ablynx’s Nanobodies— therapeutic proteins based on single-domain antibody fragments—for the treatment of immune-mediated inflammatory disease. Ablynx will get about $27 million up
front plus $9 million in research funding. ▸ STA Pharmaceutical, a manufacturing division of WuXi AppTec, has signed a five-year agreement to supply Tesaro with starting and intermediate materials for its ovarian cancer drug Zejula. FDA approved Zejula in March. ▸ CARB-X, a U.S.-U.K. partnership for new antibiotics, is distributing up to $17.6 million in a second round of R&D funding. The money will go to Achaogen, Antabio, Bugworks Research, Debiopharm, EligoChem, Iterum Therapeutics, and VenatoRx Pharmaceuticals.
JULY 31, 2017 | CEN.ACS.ORG | C&EN
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