BUSINESS CONCENTRATES
MORE PFOA LAWSUITS SCHEDULED FOR 2017
EASTMAN EYES PETROCHEMICAL SALE
The judge overseeing the contaminated drinking water class-action lawsuit against DuPont and its successor Chemours says he will schedule 40 individual trials a year beginning in April 2017. The trials, drawn from 3,500 suits consolidated in Columbus, Ohio, federal court, will focus on plaintiffs who claim they got cancer from exposure to perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) that leaked into wells near the firm’s Parkersburg, W.Va., plant. The move puts pressure on defendants and plaintiffs to come to terms. DuPont used PFOA as processing aid to make fluoropolymers but phased it out after 2006. In October 2015, a federal jury awarded a defendant with kidney cancer $1.6 million in the first of six bellwether trials intended to determine the firms’ liability.—MSR
Confident that a pipeline dispute with Westlake Chemical is going in its favor, Eastman Chemical has resurrected plans to sell its excess ethylene capacity in Longview, Texas, as well as unnamed olefins derivative operations at the site. For several years, Eastman has been fighting with Westlake over the tariffs Westlake charges to use a pipeline leaving the Longview plant. Eastman sold its polyethylene business to Westlake in 2006 and since then has supplied that firm with ethylene. Eastman says Westlake’s fees prevent it from supplying the wider ethylene market. Following favorable rulings from the Texas Railroad Commission and an appeals court, Eastman has hired an investment bank to divest the ethylene capacity and other derivative operations. In a conference call with analysts, Chief Financial Officer Curt Espeland said the company will likely keep its largest ethylene cracker on the site but sell smaller units.—AHT
on the rise as farmers increasingly feed their animals dried distillers grains, a byproduct of converting corn into ethanol. Use of the by-product requires amino acid supplementation. Ajinomoto says the plant will be the first in the U.S. for feed-grade tryptophan.—MM
TEIJIN PROMOTES VOLCANO-PROOF FIBERS
TEIJIN
Teijin has begun selling grades of p-aramid fiber that can be used as construction materials in areas affected by volcanic eruptions.
In tests, the fibers The museum being renovated in resisted the impact of fist-sized volcanic Kyushu, Japan. rocks, the company claims. Teijin says the fibers are best suited for building evacuation shelters near volcanoes. Japan’s Ministry of the Environment is using the new fibers in the roof of a museum undergoing renovation in Kyushu, home of an active volcano, the company says.—JFT
AJINOMOTO PLANS TRYPTOPHAN IN U.S. The amino acid specialist Ajinomoto plans to build a 3,000-metric-ton-peryear feed-grade tryptophan plant at its facility in Eddyville, Iowa. The Japanese company says demand for the additive is
SOLAZYME TRIMS STAFF AND OPERATING COSTS Algal products firm Solazyme says it will cut staff by 20% and consolidate its manufacturing operations in a bid to lower spending by about $40 million per year. In a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, the firm also says its Brazilian venture with Bunge has been expanded to include algal food ingredients. In October, Solazyme terminated manufacturing agreements with Archer Daniels Midland in Clinton, Iowa, and American Natural Processors in Galva, Iowa. The company runs its own plant in Peoria, Ill.—MMB
ALBEMARLE TO BUILD CHILEAN LITHIUM PLANT Albemarle will build a lithium carbonate plant in Chile, where it already operates two lithium chemical plants. The plan follows an agreement with the Chilean government that the company can increase production to 70,000 metric tons of battery-grade lithium carbonate and 6,000 metric tons of lithium chloride annually over 27 years. Additionally, Albemarle has an option to CEN.ACS.ORG
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produce lithium hydroxide directly from brine. Last year the firm opened a $200 million lithium carbonate facility in La Negra, Chile, and disclosed plans to build lithium carbonate and hydroxide plants either in the U.S. or Asia.—AS
AGILENT SUES TWIST OVER SYNTHETIC DNA The synthetic DNA start-up Twist Bioscience is denying a claim by Agilent Technologies that Twist cofounder Emily Leproust stole trade secrets from Agilent. Leproust is a former Agilent chemistry R&D director who left the company in 2013 to cofound Twist. Like other synthetic DNA providers, Twist uses phosphoramidite chemistry. But instead of the standard 96-well plate, Twist does its chemistry in 10,000 nanowells on a silicon chip. Agilent’s complaint alleges that Leproust, while working for Agilent, used its resources, people, and proprietary information to develop Twist’s technology.—MM
EUROPEAN FIRMS SIGN ASIA R&D AGREEMENTS Evonik Industries has formed a research partnership with India’s Institute of Chemical Technology. The German firm will help support students at the university and collaborate with scientists on chemical R&D projects. Meanwhile, the Danish catalyst supplier Haldor Topsøe has set up its first R&D center outside Denmark, at
BUSINESS CONCENTRATES
LONZA WILL ENTER DRUG PRODUCT FIELD The Swiss custom drug manufacturing giant Lonza says it will complement its drug active ingredient business with a new business in finished-drug product services. To be based at the firm’s laboratories in Basel, the business will help customers create injectable and infusible versions of antibodies, drug conjugates, peptides, and small molecules. Lonza tried to create such a business in 2009 by acquiring the drug product firm Patheon, but its bid was rejected.—MM
development in their fetuses. Humans can be infected with the virus when bitten by Egyptian tiger mosquitoes. Icaridin is not an insecticide and is safe for women to use when pregnant, the firm says. The molecule repels mosquitoes by acting on their odorant receptors, says Dirk Sandri, head of fine chemicals marketing.—AS
BUSINESS ROUNDUP Arkema won’t exercise an option to increase its stake in Taixing Sunke Chemicals, an acrylic acid producer in Jiangsu, China. Arkema says market conditions in China don’t favor the investment and that it will deploy the unused funds in pursuit of small acquisitions in highperformance materials. KRATON Performance Polymers has sold its polymer compounding business to PolyOne for $72 million. Under a longterm agreement, Kraton
GSK AND J&J BACK MEDICXI FUND
… AS SANOFI LAUNCHES ZIKA VACCINE PROGRAM In response to the rapid spread of the Zika virus, Sanofi has begun work on a vaccine
Life sciences venture capital firm Medicxi Ventures, recently spun off from Index Ventures, has closed a $250 million fund devoted to early-stage investments. GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson & Johnson have upped their stake in the fund, which is primarily focused on opportunities in Europe. Medicxi will continue Index’s “assetcentric” model, in which virtual companies are set up to develop a single therapy rather than a pipeline of drugs.—LJ
TAKEDA AND MERSANA BOOST PARTNERSHIP
LANXESS TOUTS ICARIDIN AS ZIKA PREVENTER … The German chemical maker Lanxess is marketing the insect repellent icaridin as a means of protection O against the Zika viN O rus. Most commonly, Zika causes fever, OH rash, and joint swellIcaridin ing, but researchers are concerned about a link between infected pregnant women and abnormal head
Dengue fever, for which the company has already developed a vaccine.—LJ
SANOFI
the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics in China. Under a related agreement, Topsøe will select and finance projects to be executed by researchers there. The institute is China’s largest catalyst research center, Topsøe claims.—JFT
against the infecSanofi vaccine researchers at tion. Although sevwork in France. eral biotech firms claim to be working on a Zika vaccine, Sanofi believes it is uniquely positioned to tackle Zika because it belongs to the same family of viruses as
will supply polymers used to make the compounds. PolyOne says the purchase builds on its 2008 acquisition of the thermoplastic elastomer compounder GLS. SOLIDENERGY Systems, a Massachusettsbased battery technology firm, has raised $12 million in its second round of venture funding, led by an unnamed U.S. auto company. SolidEnergy has developed an “ultrathin anode” lithium metal battery that it claims is safer and has higher energy density than standard Liion batteries.
CALYSTA, a biotech firm that produces fuels and food ingredients via natural gas fermentation, has raised $30 million in its third round of venture funding. Calysta and one of the investors, Cargill, will collaborate on proteins used in fish and livestock feed. AVA BIOCHEM, a Swiss biobased chemicals developer, will expand its portfolio to include 2,5-furandicarboxylic acid (FDCA), an input for the biobased polymer polyethylene furanoate. AVA’s first chemical, 5-hydroxymethylfurfural, can
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Takeda Pharmaceutical and Mersana Therapeutics have for a second time expanded an antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) partnership that began in 2014. Under the new deal, Takeda gets rights outside the U.S. and Canada to Mersana’s lead product candidate, XMT-1522, an ADC that targets HER2-expressing cancers. Takeda also gets additional access to Mersana’s ADC technology, which features chemistry that links high anticancer payloads to antibodies. Mersana will get $40 million up front and an investment of up to $20 million.—MM
be made into FDCA via oxidation. GEVO has expanded an agreement to license its biobased isobutyl alcohol technology to the Argentinian firm Porta Hnos. Under the pact, Gevo says, at least four such plants could be built in Argentina, the first opening in 2017 with capacity for up to 19 million L per year. MERCK & CO. will pay $15 million to the U.K.’s Cancer Research Technology as part of a deal to develop inhibitors of protein arginine methyltransferase 5, which
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have the potential to treat blood disorders. The U.K. group licensed the technology on behalf of CTx, an Australian academic partnership. ASTRAZENECA and Allergan will collaborate on the development of ATM-AVI, a fixed-dose combination of the older antibiotic aztreonam and the non-β-lactam β-lactamase inhibitor avibactam, for the treatment of gram-negative infections. The partners last year gained approval for Avycaz, which combines avibactam and ceftazidime.
