Battery materials turned into nutrients

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Business Concentrates
PHARMACEUTICAL CHEMICALS
▸ South Korea’s SK
will acquire Ampac
The South Korean conglomerate SK Holdings
will acquire Ampac Fine Chemicals
as part of its plan to become a top-tier
pharmaceutical contract development and
manufacturing firm. Owned by the private
equity firm H.I.G. Capital, Ampac operates
plants in California, Texas, and Virginia
and is one of the largest U.S. producers
of pharmaceutical chemicals. Its Virginia
facility was once owned by the drugmaker
Boehringer Ingelheim. SK has drug chemical
operations in South Korea and last year
acquired a Bristol-Myers Squibb plant in
Ireland. —MICHAEL MCCOY
ENERGY STORAGE
▸ Matthey advances
new battery material
INORGANIC CHEMICALS
FTC takes Tronox and
Cristal to federal court
The Federal Trade Commission has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in
Washington, D.C., seeking a restraining order and an injunction preventing
the titanium dioxide producers Tronox and Cristal from merging. Tronox
agreed to purchase its white pigment rival, a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s
National Industrialization Co., in February 2017 for $1.7 billion in cash, plus
stock. In December, seeking to block the merger, FTC brought the case before
an administrative judge, a process that hasn’t been completed. The European
Commission approved the deal earlier this month, requiring only the
divestiture of a business in paper-laminate-grade TiO 2 . Should the merger
proceed, FTC says, Tronox and rival Chemours would have a commanding
U.S. market share for high-value chloride-process TiO 2 . “The proposed acquisition
would substantially increase concentration in an already concentrated
market,” FTC says in its complaint. Tronox says the court date will
provide “the company a forum to demonstrate how the proposed acquisition
enhances the company’s competitiveness on a global scale.” —ALEX TULLO
planned ramp-up in capacity. “With our
groundbreaking clean technology, fertilizer
manufacturers, recyclers, and governments
can turn problematic and costly
alkaline battery waste to a premium-level
micronutrient,” Tracegrow CEO Tatu Leppänen
says. —ALEX SCOTT
funding from investors, including 415
Investments and NXT Ventures. Manus,
based on technology developed at MIT,
aims to produce ingredients by fermentation
that are normally derived from plants.
The company is targeting what it calls rare
and expensive ingredients used in flavors,
fragrances, cosmetics, agriculture, nutrition,
and pharmaceuticals. It has disclosed
programs to manufacture the stevia sweetener
rebaudioside M, the antimalarial artemisinin,
and the tick and mite pesticide
acaricide. —MELODY BOMGARDNER
Johnson Matthey will build a 1,000-metric-ton-per-year
facility at its site in Clitheroe,
England, to produce sample quantities
of its enhanced lithium nickel oxide
(eLNO) electric-vehicle battery material.
The firm says it is also designing a fullscale
eLNO facility to be built in mainland
MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS
Europe. Unlike competing battery materials,
eLNO contains minimal amounts of
▸ Linde, Praxair ready
second gas sale
cobalt, notes a recent report from Argus
Media. —MICHAEL MCCOY
Linde and Praxair say they are in “advanced NUCLEAR POWER
negotiations” to sell most of Linde’s industrial
gas business in North America
AGRICULTURE
and some Linde and Praxair assets in
▸ Battery materials South America to a partnership of German
gas firm Messer and private equity
turned into nutrients
firm CVC Capital Partners. The sales are
considered necessary to win regulatory
Tracegrow has opened a plant in Kärsämäki,
Finland, that converts used alkaline Praxair. The companies recently agreed
approval for the merger of Linde and
batteries into zinc and manganese trace to sell Praxair’s European industrial gas
elements for agricultural use. The start-up business to Taiyo Nippon Sanso for close to
says it is making 10-m 3 batches at its plant $6 billion. —MICHAEL MCCOY
each week. Tracegrow has now brought
in engineering firm Pöyry to assist with a
NATURAL PRODUCTS
▸ Manus Bio raises
A small ball of
thorium contains
funds for ingredients
all the energy
a person will
Boston-area start-up Manus Bio has raised use in their life,
$19.4 million in its first round of venture Flibe says.
14 C&EN | CEN.ACS.ORG | JULY 16, 2018
▸ Flibe wins U.S. funds
for nuclear research
The U.S. Department of Energy is funding
new research into liquid fluoride thorium
reactor (LFTR) technology. LFTRs generate
nuclear power with thorium carried in a
solution of molten fluoride
salts, a technology
advocates say is safer
and more efficient than
conventional uranium
reactors. Flibe Energy
CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK (BATTERIES); FLIBE ENERGY (THORIUM)

will receive $2.1 million from DOE and
$525,500 from other sources to study the
use of nitrogen trifluoride to remove uranium
from the nuclear fuel solution. The
funding is part of a $20 million DOE package
for nine industry-led advanced nuclear
R&D projects. —CRAIG BETTENHAUSEN
GENOMICS
▸ DNA Script gets
grant to go long
DNA Script, a start-up based in Paris, has
won $2.7 million in grants from Bpifrance,
a state-backed program for French entrepreneurs.
The company uses enzymes,
rather than chemical processes, to assemble
synthetic DNA for use in cell therapies
and gene editing. It claims that its process
makes longer DNA constructs more quickly
and cleanly than competing approaches
do. DNA Script raised $13 million in September
2017 from investors, including
the venture arms of Illumina and Merck
KGaA. —MELODY BOMGARDNER
START-UPS
▸ Compass launches
with $132 million
Compass Therapeutics has raised a total
of $132 million in its first formal round of
financing. The Cambridge, Mass.-based
biotech firm was formed in 2014 to capitalize
on a bispecific antibody screening
platform that allows it to probe the activity
of combinations of immune cells. It also
boasts a discovery platform that swiftly
yields therapeutics—either monoclonal or
bispecific antibodies. Compass has more
than 70 employees and expects to begin
clinical studies of its most advanced drug
candidate, an antibody against an undisclosed
immuno-oncology target, in the
first half of 2019. —LISA JARVIS
NUCLEIC ACIDS
▸ Regulus cuts jobs
after safety setback
Regulus Therapeutics, a biotech firm developing
oligonucleotide drugs that target
microRNAs, will cut 60% of its workforce,
or about 35 jobs. The decision follows the
observation of acute mouse toxicity in a
Phase I study of RGLS4326, a treatment
for autosomal dominant polycystic kidney
disease. The firm also halted recruitment
for a study of a microRNA drug it is developing
with Sanofi. —MICHAEL MCCOY
PROCESS CHEMISTRY
▸ U.K. builds center for
medicine production
The U.K. will create a $75 million center of
excellence for small-molecule pharmaceutical
and fine chemicals manufacturing near
Glasgow, Scotland. The center aims to help
industry, academia, health care providers,
People involved
pose at the launch
of the Medicines
Manufacturing
Innovation Center.
and regulators
address challenges
in the medicine
supply chain. Users
will be able to
evaluate processes
using continuous, autonomous, and digital
technologies. Creation of the center, which
will generate up to 80 jobs, will begin this
summer and continue for three years. It’s
backed by a consortium featuring the University
of Strathclyde, AstraZeneca, and
GlaxoSmithKline. —ALEX SCOTT
ANTIBIOTICS
▸ Novartis to end
anti-infectives R&D
Novartis has decided to exit antibacterial
and antiviral research. About 140 related
jobs are being eliminated in Emeryville,
Calif.; about 150 jobs will remain in the
San Francisco Bay Area at the Novartis
Institute for Tropical Diseases and at departments
that support efforts focused on
difficult targets. The firm says it is talking
to other companies about out-licensing its
antibiotic programs. They include LYS228,
a compound that is being tested in clinical
trials for its ability to kill Gram-negative
bacteria. —MICHAEL MCCOY
CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF STRATHCLYDE
Business Roundup
▸ Solvay will spend $56 million
to modernize the cogeneration
plant at its soda ash
and sodium bicarbonate facility
in Bernburg, Germany.
The firm says the project will
boost the site’s long-term
competitiveness.
▸ Arlanxeo will spend close
to $100 million to modernize
a polybutadiene facility in
Brazil and a nitrile butadiene
rubber facility in France. Arlanxeo
is a synthetic rubber
joint venture between Saudi
Aramco and Lanxess.
▸ AkzoNobel plans a second
expansion of chloromethanes
capacity in Frankfurt
that will raise capacity by up
to 50%. The firm recently
completed a project there
that boosted output of methylene
chloride, chloroform,
and carbon tetrachloride.
▸ Ionic Materials, a maker of
solid-state polymer battery
electrolytes, has received an
undisclosed investment from
the venture arm of Hyundai
Motor. The automaker
says the start-up’s material
will improve the safety,
performance, and price of
lithium-ion electric-vehicle
batteries.
▸ BASF plans to increase
capacity for Irganox 1010, an
antioxidant, by 40% at sites
in Singapore and Switzerland.
The sterically hindered
phenolic antioxidant is added
to a variety of plastics.
▸ BASF has acquired Advanc3D
Materials and Setup
Performance, two European
firms that make products
for laser sintering. BASF
says the purchases continue
its expansion into the
three-dimensional printing
of plastics.
▸ Otsuka Pharmaceutical
will acquire Visterra for
about $430 million. Otsuka
says Visterra’s Hierotope
technology enables the
design of precision antibody-based
therapies.
▸ AstraZeneca, the University
of Cambridge, and
the Dutch firm Lumicks will
form a center of excellence
for dynamic single-molecule
analysis. The center will be
based around Lumicks’s
C-Trap optical tweezers-fluorescence
microscope.
JULY 16, 2018 | CEN.ACS.ORG | C&EN 15