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
FEBRUARY 8, 2016
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.
