Business Roundup

Evonik Industries has licensed its hydrogen and sodium cyanide technology to Germany’s EPC Engineering Consulting. EPC in turn will build a 40,000-metric-ton-per-year sodium cyanide plant for Russia’s Korund Cyan, which will market the chemical for the extraction of gold from ore.

Avantor Performance Materials, formerly Mallinckrodt Baker, will rename its Mallinckrodt Chemicals line Macron Chemicals. Avantor, recently acquired by private equity firm New Mountain Capital, will continue to use the J.T. Baker brand name.

ITT Corp. has completed the acquisition of O.I. Corp. for $29 million. O.I., with annual revenues of $20 million, specializes in total organic carbon analyzers and gas-chromatography-related instruments. ITT says the acquisition will allow it to increase its presence in the $6 billion global instrumentation market.

BASF has begun construction of a $50 million plant to make cathode materials for lithium-ion electric-car batteries in Elyria, Ohio. The technology for the lithium-stabilized nickel-cobalt-manganese cathode materials is licensed from Argonne National Laboratory, and the facility is being built with the help of a $24.6 million grant from the Department of Energy.

Syngenta will donate $10 million to the ETH Zurich Foundation to support a Sustainable Agroecosystems professorship and research staff at ETH Zurich. The research will focus on scientific approaches to maximizing agricultural output while minimizing inputs, economic losses, and ecological damage.

The College of Nanoscale Science & Engineering at the State University of New York, Albany, has set up programs with Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science & Technology, National Institute for Materials Science, and the University of Tsukuba. Academic exchanges and joint research will be focused in six areas, including nanoelectronics and nanomaterial safety.

Sigma-Aldrich and Domainex, a U.K.-based contract research firm, agreed to develop epigenetic research tools. Domainex will build biochemical assays for target enzymes using its protein-cloning technology. Sigma-Aldrich will use the technology to raise specific monoclonal antibodies that can be used with the assays to identify target proteins and study their functions.