Business Roundup

Akzo Nobel's Organon business unit is teaming up with Dyax to discover and develop human therapeutic antibodies for the treatment of autoimmune diseases and cancer. For license fees, research funding, milestone payments, and royalties, Dyax will use its proprietary phage display technology to identify antibodies directed toward a promising target found at Organon's research center in Cambridge, Mass.

Penwest Pharmaceuticals has agreed to pay $7.5 million to license Edison Pharmaceuticals' drug EPI-A0001, a treatment of inherited mitochondrial respiratory chain diseases. Penwest plans to submit an Investigational New Drug Application for EPI-AOO1 to FDA in early 2008. The companies will also collaborate to discover and develop drugs to treat other mitochondrial diseases.

Evotec has doubled the capacity of its sterile active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturing facility in Glasgow, Scotland. The company says the project was undertaken in response to demand for liquid and lyophilized, or freeze-dried, APIs.

Roche Chairman and CEO Franz B. Humer, 61, is halving his job and will serve solely as chairman of the company as of the next annual meeting on March 4, 2008. He will be succeeded as CEO by Severin Schwan, 40, currently CEO of Roche Diagnostics. Humer has held the dual post since 2001; prior to that he was CEO, appointed in 1998.

Huntsman will host and operate an 89 million-gal-per-year biodiesel plant to be constructed by RBF Port Neches, an affiliate of private equity firm MatlinPatterson.

The earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale that hit Japan on the morning of Monday, July 16, caused little damage to the country's chemical industry. This tremor was centered in Niigata prefecture, a region where data from the Japan Chemical Industry Association show few chemical plants.