Business Roundup

Air Products & Chemicals has broken ground on a 100-metric-ton-per-day ion-transport-membrane-based oxygen plant in Convent, La. ITMs are an alternative to the cryogenic air separation process and use a ceramic material that ionizes and separates oxygen from air under pressure and tem perature.

Eastman Chemical is expanding annual benzoate plasticizer capacity at its Kohtla-Järve, Estonia, plant by 11,000 metric tons next year. Expansions at its Chestertown, Md., and Kingsport, Tenn., sites will boost capacity by another 9,000 metric tons over the same time frame.

Evonik Industries has expanded its roll-to-roll acrylic solar lens panel plant in Sanford, Maine. The lenses are used in concentrated photovoltaic modules and have an optical efficiency of 87.5%.

Huntsman Corp. is launching a multi-million-dollar engineering study to expand multifunctional epoxy resins capacity at its McIntosh, Ala., plant. So far this year, the company has doubled functionalized epoxy resins at its Monthey, Switzerland, site and has increased capacity in McIntosh to produce purified resins.

Merck & Co. will collaborate with BGI, a genomics science center with headquarters in China, to discover biomarkers and develop genomic technologies. Their projects will focus on biomarkers for use in drug discovery and development and in diagnostics applications across a range of therapeutic areas.

Silence Therapeutics will apply its siRNA delivery systems to microRNAs from InteRNA Technologies to develop anticancer therapeutics. London-based Silence is eligible to receive up-front fees as well as staged research payments from its Netherlands-based partner.

Air Products & Chemicals will more than double its production capacity for nitrogen trifluoride at its plant in Ulsan, South Korea. The company says that demand is strong for the chamber-cleaning gas used by producers of semiconductors, liquid-crystal displays, and photovoltaic cells.

Pfizer and Jilin Guo­yuan Animal Health will form an animal vaccines venture in China. Focusing initially on swine, the venture will develop, produce, and sell vaccines for various kinds of livestock. China raises more pigs than any other country, with the swine population currently numbering 600 million.