Business Roundup

LanzaTech, which turns waste gas streams into liquid fuels and chemicals, has raised $60 million in new funding from investors. Japan’s Mitsui & Co. led the round with a $20 million investment; other investors include Siemens and Khosla Ventures. Proceeds will fund research on new feedstocks the firm can process and new chemicals it can produce.

Solvay completed the $32.6 million acquisition of Plextronics in a U.S.-bankruptcy-court-supervised sale. The firm says that Plextronics’s organic light-emitting diode technology will enhance the capabilities of a new electronics laboratory it is setting up at South Korea’s Ewha Womans University.

Cabot has agreed to sell its security materials business to security inks provider SICPA for $20 million. The business, which makes covert taggants, had $7 million in sales last year.

Evonik Industries plans to sell its Stoko line of industrial skin care products to Deb Group for an undisclosed sum. Evonik makes the products at sites in Germany, the U.S., and Russia.

GlaxoSmithKline, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute, and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute are planning a research initiative to bring “big data” integration techniques and genome-sequencing information to bear in drug discovery. The new Centre for Therapeutic Target Validation will address a wide variety of human diseases and share its data openly with other researchers.

Total and IFP Energies Nouvelles, along with its affiliate firm Axens, have developed a new catalyst and production system to make ethylene via dehydration of biobased ethanol. The partners plan to commercialize the catalyst and license the technology, which they say is low cost and can be integrated with ethanol production or downstream resin ­manufacturing.

Evotec, a biotech services company, has acquired Bionamics, a firm that converts academic innovation into technologies for the biotech and pharma sectors. Bionamics has a portfolio of attractive and fully funded projects especially in neurodegeneration and central nervous system innovations, Evotec says.

Ajinomoto says it has developed a process for making l-tyrosine by fermentation using only plants as raw materials. Compared with extracting the amino acid from animal and plant sources, the new process will enable full traceability of all raw materials. l-Tyrosine is increasingly used for making biopharmaceuticals, Ajinomoto says.