Business Roundup

Chemtura has ended an agreement to acquire India’s largest bromine maker, Solaris ChemTech Industries. Changes in bromine market conditions and transactional difficulties scuttled the $142 million deal, Chemtura says. It was first announced in 2012.

Ineos will close its plant in Lima, Ohio, that makes Barex brand acrylonitrile-methyl acrylate resins, which are used to produce packaging materials. Ineos says the business has struggled financially for several years.

Shin-Etsu Chemical plans to spend $46 million to expand its silicones R&D activities in Japan. The company will add a new building at its silicone and electronic materials research center in Gunma prefecture in central Japan.

BASF will boost its capacity to make tert-butylamine at its complex in Nanjing, China, by 60% to 16,000 metric tons per year. The amine is used to make rubber and tires and in the pharmaceutical and crop protection industries.

UWI Technology, a Scottish start-up, has raised about $2 million from investors to develop an elapsed-time-indicator label that can show whether food is safe to consume. The firm also sees applications for the label in the aerospace, engineering, and life sciences idustries.

Fujifilm has agreed to buy Kalon Biotherapeutics, a manufacturer of vaccines made in mammalian cell culture. With headquarters in College Station, Texas, Kalon is owned by the state of Texas and Texas A&M University. Kalon is a subcontractor to the U.S. government for developing vaccines in response to terrorist attacks or pandemic flu outbreaks.

GPCR Consortium, an industry-academic collaboration to generate high-resolution images of G protein-coupled receptors, has launched. Members so far are the companies Amgen,Sanofi, and Ono along with iHuman Institute at ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, and the University of Southern California. The consortium seeks five more industry partners.

Johnson & Johnson plans to open an incubator within the Texas Medical Center’s Innovation Institute in Houston. The pharma company’s J-Labs (formerly called Janssen Labs) network already hosts 70 life sciences firms at facilities in San Diego, San Francisco, and Boston. The Houston site will house up to 50 start-ups.

Syros Pharmaceuticals has raised $53 million in a second round of funding. New investors include Polaris Partners, Aisling Capital, and Redmile Group. The Watertown, Mass.-based company is developing gene control therapies for cancer and other diseases.