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Business

Business Roundup

April 12, 2010 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 88, Issue 15

BASF has sold two divisions of the former Ciba Expert Services business to Intertek, a provider of quality and safety services. Intertek says the purchase, which includes a drug testing lab in Basel, Switzerland, expands its ability to provide regulatory consulting.

Air Products & Chemicals plans to build a 1.5 million-cu-ft-per-day hydrogen unit in West Port, which is in Selangor, Malaysia. To be completed in the first quarter of 2011, the steam methane reformer will supply hydrogen and steam to oleochemical makers and other customers. It will be Air Products’ second hydrogen plant in West Port.

Dynea has sold its half of a Brazilian joint venture, Dynea Brasil, to its partner, Chilean forestry firm Arauco. The venture makes resins for panel board and paper impregnation as well as decorative paper overlays. Dynea will continue to make phenolic resins in Brazil.

Lenzing has acquired a 75% interest in the Czech wood pulp producer Biocel Paskov to give it another source of pulp for cellulosic fiber production. Austria-based Lenzing says it will invest $60 million to expand capacity and make other improvements at the Czech firm, which has annual sales of $152 million.

Amyris Biotechnologies, a renewable chemicals and fuels start-up, has received an investment of $47.8 million from Temasek Holdings, a Singapore-based investment firm. Amyris says it will use the funds to support commercial plant design and construction in the U.S. and Brazil.

HCL CleanTech, a biofuels technology firm, will move its headquarters from Israel to the Biofuels Accelerator at the North Carolina Biofuels Campus in Oxford, N.C. In addition, the firm will locate its first pilot plant at Southern Research Institute’s advanced energy and transportation technologies center in Durham, N.C.

KV Pharmaceutical has reduced its workforce by 289 employees, or about 42%. The St. Louis-based specialty drug company withdrew most of its products last year after FDA found deficiencies in its facilities.

GlaxoSmithKline and Crucell will work together to develop a second-generation malaria vaccine. After encouraging preclinical studies of a combination of Crucell’s recombinant malaria vaccine candidate, Ad35-CS, with GSK’s late-stage vaccine candidate, RTS,S/AS, the companies will now seek third-party funding to move the combination into human trials.

Sanofi-Aventis has licensed CureDM Group’s Pancreate, a novel human peptide that may be able to restore a diabetes patient’s ability to produce insulin. CureDM, based in Wilmington, Del., could receive up to $335 million in upfront and milestone payments from Sanofi.

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