Business Roundup

Showa Denko will build a 5,000-metric-ton-per-year plant for highly purified cyclohexanone, used in electronics cleaning, in Zhejiang province, China. The unit, to start up in August, is a joint venture between Showa Denko and China’s Juhua Group. Juhua will supply the venture with cyclohexanone from one of its plants.

Agilent Technologies will collaborate with the National Center for Food Safety & Technology to develop new scientific methods for food testing. The instrument maker will supply the center with analytical chemistry and life sciences equipment to study compounds such as melamine and pesticides that may contaminate food.

Bayer CropScience and the plant functional genomics firm Mendel Biotechnology have entered into a new, three-year collaboration which extends an existing relationship. The partners’ goal is to develop chemical products that can make crops more resistant to biotic and abiotic stress factors and, in turn, stabilize yields and improve productivity.

Matheson Tri-Gas and India’s K-Air Gases are forming a joint venture that will combine their Indian industrial gases operations. Founded in 2001, K-Air has operations in Pune and Auran­gabad, where it transfills helium and produces packaged gases.

Sigma-Aldrich has signed a license deal with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organization allowing it to manufacture reversible addition-fragmentation chain-transfer agents. The agents are organic molecules that can be added to polymerization reactions to control product molecular weight.

Acetylon Pharmaceuticals has licensed drug discovery technology from Harvard University and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The license includes a portfolio of selective histone deacetyl­ase inhibitor compounds and a technique for high-throughput screening and lead optimization.

Lonza will make Odyssey Thera’s protein-fragment complementation assay technology available to life sciences and drug discovery researchers as part of its compound-profiling service. Under the deal, Lonza has become a minority shareholder in the San Ramon, Calif.-based firm.

Novartis will pay Transgene $10 million for an option on TG4010, a targeted immunotherapy product using a modified vaccinia Ankara virus vector, for the treatment of non-small-cell lung cancer and other cancers. Transgene could receive additional payments of $950 million.