Business Roundup

The Society of Chemical Manufacturers & Affiliates’ president and CEO, Joseph Acker, will retire in December. Acker has led the trade association for more than six years. SOCMA has begun searching for a replacement.

Dow Chemical will close styrene and ethylbenzene plants at its Freeport, Texas, site by the end of the year. The firm closed a smaller styrene plant at the site late last year.

Dow Chemical has signed an agreement to sell its hollow-sphere plastic pigment line to Omnova Solutions for an undisclosed sum. The Federal Trade Commission required Dow to sell the business as a condition of approving its acquisition of Rohm and Haas.

Bayer CropScience has invested more than $7 million to expand its chemical-compound storage facility in Monheim, Germany. Bayer says the collection contains about 2.2 million substances used in the search for promising crop protection active ingredients.

Xoma and Arana Therapeutics, a subsidiary of Cephalon, will collaborate on antibody-based drug development using Xoma technologies. Arana will spend $6 million up front and will pay other fees to access Xoma’s antibody discovery, engineering, and manufacturing capabilities, along with its antibody phage-display libraries.

BioLeap will use its computational fragment-based drug design technology to create novel compounds for Glaxo­SmithKline drug targets. The targets are ones for which high-throughput screening and other methods have failed to generate any leads. GSK will synthesize the compounds and test them.

Sigma Pharmaceuticals will acquire a Bristol-Myers Squibb plant in Australia for $51 million. The Australian firm will supply products to BMS for up to five years. Sigma also gets the right to sell 15 branded drugs in Australia and New Zealand.