Business Roundup

Praxair has sold its advanced components business to Fremont, Calif.-based FM Industries. The business, which generated $28 million in sales in 2011, makes specialized clamps and chamber components for semiconductor processing equipment.

Huntsman Corp. has appointed Jon M. Huntsman Jr. to its board. He is the son of the company’s founder and the brother of its CEO, Peter R. Huntsman. Jon Huntsman Jr., who once served as the company’s vice chairman, recently dropped his bid to become U.S. president.

Actives International, a maker of natural extracts for personal care products, has purchased the assets of household and industrial ingredients makers Surfactants Inc. and Surety Laboratories, both based in New Jersey. Surety, a maker of industrial biocides, will operate as a division of Surfactants.

SI Group will spend $30 million to build a phenolic resins plant in Nanjing, China. Scheduled to open in May 2013, the facility will have 30,000 metric tons per year of capacity. SI, which is based in Schenectady, N.Y., says the plant will later be expanded to 70,000 metric tons.

Dow AgroSciences and BioDuro have signed a three-year research agreement to generate new molecules for use in the synthesis of fungicides, insecticides, and herbicides. With labs in Beijing, BioDuro is a contract research organization that PPD acquired in 2009.

Apotex, a Canadian generic drug maker, has paid Sanofi and Bristol-Myers Squibb $442 million to settle a lawsuit in which the two drug companies accused Apotex of launching a generic version of Plavix, an anticlotting drug, before its patent had expired. Litigation in the case began in 2002.

GlaxoSmithKline will invest $60 million to expand its manufacturing and drug development activities in Australia, creating 58 skilled jobs at its Boronia site near Melbourne by 2017. A new pilot-scale plant will support GSK’s work with the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences and contract manufacturing for local firms.

Rigaku and the University of Tokyo have opened an industry-academia collaboration center at the university to support nanotechnology education. The company is providing equipment with the goal of further establishing X-ray diffraction as a materials analysis and characterization technique.

PerkinElmer has launched four new enzymatic assays to help researchers find epigenetics-based drug candidates for cancer and neurodegenerative disorders. The kits, which allow endogenous modification of epigenetic marks on histone H3 to be detected, expand the PerkinElmer epigenetics assay portfolio to 35 kits.