BIOBASED CHEMICALS
▸ Microbes help make ambergris scent
ucts; GABA is an ingredient in weight- and stress-management products.—MELODY
BOMGARDNER
PHARMACEUTICAL CHEMICALS Firmenich says it has scaled up a new route to Ambrox, a woody-scented fragrance molecule, with an assist from microbes. Ambrox , known generically as ambroxO ide, is a component of ambergris, an excretion from the digestive tract of sperm whales. Because ambergris is rare, Ambrox the fragrance industry has long relied on a semisynthetic process to make it from sclareol, which is isolated from the herb clary sage. Firmenich scientists engineered microbes to make sclareol from sugar.—MELODY BOMGARDNER
FOOD INGREDIENTS
▸ Firms partner on proteins from grass
ARKEMA
▸ Weil Group Resources is building a facility in Saskatchewan to annually refine 1.1 million m3 of helium from local gas wells. Linde is providing technology and will also buy and market the output of the plant, which is scheduled to open late this year. ▸ Air Liquide has inaugurated its second research facility in China. Built in Shanghai’s Minhang district, the lab can support 250 researchers working on energy transition, emissions reduction, waste-
Seeking to address the issue of reliability in the pharmaceutical building block marketplace, a group of laboratory chemical suppliers based in Russia and Ukraine—Enamine, ChemBridge, UORSY, and FCH Group— have pooled their catalogs to launch ChemSpace. Claiming its combined library consists of 15 million unique building blocks, the group is offering free access with no commission on sales. Customers purchase directly from suppliers via the website. Last May, a similar service called LabNetwork was launched by the Chinese services company WuXi PharmaTech.—RICK MULLIN
WATER
▸ Filtration membrane uses Arkema polymer Polymem, a French maker of water filtration products, is building a new production line to make hollow-fiber membranes using Arkema’s nanostructured polyvinylidene fluoride polymer. The two joined
ONCOLOGY
The German food ingredient maker Taiyo and Biofabrik, a German start-up, have formed a partnership to produce specialty proteins made from fast-growing grasses. Biofabrik has developed technology to ferment the grasses with lactic acid-producing bacteria to yield vegan protein powders. The powders contain a high proportion of branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) and γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA). BCAAs are commonly added to sports nutrition prod-
Roundup
▸ Building block market debuts
Precision BioSciences’ genome-editing technology allows CARTs to be developed from healthy donors as treatments for multiple patients. The partners expect the first allogeneic CART therapy will enter the clinic late next year.—LISA JARVIS
▸ Baxalta pursues cellular therapy Baxalta will pay $105 million to genome-editing firm Precision BioSciences as part of a pact to develop off-the-shelf chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CART) therapies for six cancer targets. The most advanced CART therapies have been highly personalized: Companies reengineer a patient’s own T cells to find and destroy cancer cells.
water treatment, food safety, health care, and other customer problems. ▸ Saudi Basic Industries Corp. has acquired a majority stake in Fibre Reinforced Thermoplastics of Lelystad, the Netherlands. The company makes engineering thermoplastic composite tapes used in transportation and construction. ▸ Mitsui Chemicals, Jayant Agro-Organics, and partners have inaugurated a facility in Gujarat, India, that can make 8,000 metric tons per year of biobased polyol, a poly-
Polyvinylidene fluoride-based hollow fibers will speed up water treatment, Arkema says. forces in 2014 to develop the new membrane, which they say is more durable and better at filtering out bacteria and viruses than conventional membranes.—MARC
REISCH
urethane raw material. Fed by locally sourced castor oil, the plant is “overwhelmingly cost-competitive,” Mitsui claims. ▸ ZeaChem, a biorefining firm, and Leaf Resources have joined to develop a project in the Southeast U.S. based on Leaf’s Glycell process, which breaks down biomass into separate cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin components. Leaf has upped its ownership stake in ZeaChem to 13% with a $400,000 investment. ▸ GlaxoSmithKline has opened a technical devel-
opment lab and a kilo-scale manufacturing facility for specialized active ingredients at its site in Cork, Ireland. Together, the facilities cost $13 million. ▸ Exelixis and Ipsen are joining to develop Exelixis’s cabozantinib outside the U.S., Canada, and Japan. Sold as Cometriq, cabozantinib is currently approved in the U.S. and Europe for treatment of metastatic medullary thyroid cancer in adults. Exelixis will receive $200 million, plus milestone payments upon the drug’s approval for other oncology indications.
MARCH 7, 2016 | CEN.ACS.ORG | C&EN
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