Business Roundup

Cabot Corp. will cut 300 jobs globally. That action, taken in response to lower oil prices, slowing demand in Asia and South America, and the strong U.S. dollar, will improve Cabot’s competitiveness to save $50 million next year, the firm says.

Hallstar has acquired fellow ester chemistry expert Fortinbrás based in Jaguariúna, São Paulo, Brazil. The two have complementary products in personal care and industrial specialties. Last year Hallstar acquired the Florasolvs line of natural esters from FloraTech.

Yissum Research, the technology transfer unit of Hebrew University, has created an agricultural inventions investment fund. Called Agrinnovation, the fund has already raised $4 million from investors to advance start-ups from the university in areas including nutrition, cleantech, and veterinary medicine.

Exostar, a developer of cloud computing systems, has received a $10 million investment from the Merck Global Health Innovation Fund. The money will go toward expanding Exostar products that support collaboration among drug companies, health care providers, and other life sciences partners.

Asahi Kasei has set up a committee to investigate faulty piling work performed by a subsidiary that built apartment towers in Yokohama, Japan. The committee will consist of three legal professionals who do not have ties to Asahi, the company says.

Cytec Industries has acquired an equity stake in Penso Holdings, a British maker of composite auto parts. Cytec says the two firms will partner on developing fast-curing materials to accelerate the adoption of composites by the auto industry.

C4X Discovery, a University of Manchester spin-off, has formed a drug discovery pact with the University of Oxford’s Structural Genomics Consortium. The partners will apply C4XD’s NMR-based structure solving technology to potentially therapeutic molecules discovered by SGC Oxford.

Kite Pharma will pay Alpine Immune Sciences $5 million for an exclusive license to two programs that use Alpine’s transmembrane immunomodulatory protein (TIP) technology, which seeks to modulate the “immune synapse,” the point of contact between two immune cells. Kite plans to incorporate the TIP technology into its engineered T-cell therapies.