Business Roundup

Myriant has withdrawn its initial public offering. The company, which is developing biobased routes to chemicals such as succinic acid, originally filed a prospectus with the Securities & Exchange Commission for a $125 million offering back in 2011.

Momentive Specialty Chemicals has acquired a facility that makes proppants in Shreveport, La. The plant has an annual capacity of 450 million lb. Momentive is a leading supplier of the proppants, made from resin-coated sand and used in hydraulic fracturing of unconventional oil and gas wells.

InChem, a privately held custom chemical manufacturer, has purchased property in Charlotte, N.C., and plans to invest $15 million in new process equipment there over the next three years. The site is its third in the Carolinas.

FRX Polymers has received $12 million in funding in a financing round led by Evonik Industries. FRX recently started up its first commercial-scale plant in Antwerp, Belgium, where it makes phosphorus-containing flame-retardant plastics and oligomers.

The American Chemistry Council has formed a group within its Plastics Division to raise the profile of plastics-to-oil recycling technologies. Founding members of the group include Agilyx, Cynar, and RES Polyflow.

Agilent Technologies’ Dako unit has signed an agreement to develop companion diagnostic tests for oncology drugs under development by Merck KGaA. Dako already has companion diagnostic development agreements with firms such as Eli Lilly & Co., Pfizer, and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Lonza will be the commercial manufacturer of ibrutinib, the active ingredient in Pharmacyclics’s Imbruvica, which FDA approved on Nov. 13, 2013, as a lymphoma treatment. Lonza worked with Pharmacyclics for years during development and clinical manufacturing of the pharmaceutical chemical.

Sanofi and Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, an organization of European applied research facilities, have launched a natural products center of excellence. The partners will collaborate to identify and develop novel, naturally occurring chemical and biological compounds as potential therapies, primarily for infectious diseases.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute is launching a national competition to find up to 25 new biomedical researchers. Those selected through the competition will stay at their home institutions but have their salaries, benefits, and research budgets paid by HHMI for five years.