Business Roundup

Eastman Chemical will expand capacity for its Texanol ester alcohol [2,2,4-trimethyl-1,3-pentanediol mono(2-methylpropanoate)] by more than 20% at its Longview, Texas, site. Eastman also manufactures the alcohol, a coalescent used in paints, in Singapore and China.

ExxonMobil Chemical plans to close a butyl rubber plant in Notre Dame de Gravenchon, France, in the third quarter of 2015. The plant’s 76 staffers will be transferred to an adjacent refinery. The rubber plant was built in 1959 around technology that is no longer competitive, ExxonMobil says.

DSM will sell DSM Synres, a Dutch solvent-borne alkyd and acrylic coating resins business, to the private equity firm Standard Investment for an undisclosed sum. Synres has annual sales of about $60 million. DSM says it will focus on water-based, powder, and UV-cured coating resins.

Quinpario Capital Management has been formed by former Solutia CEO Jeffry N. Quinn and former Solutia executive Nadim Z. Qureshi. The two executives will pursue an activist shareholder strategy to identify chemical firms and other investments in need of “the injection of perspective and talent,” Quinn says.

Toray Industries, the world’s largest carbon fiber producer, has agreed to buy the European carbon fiber fabric and prepreg business of Saati, one of its customers. Saati will continue to own its North American composite business.

Gavi, a government-funded vaccine alliance, says it will spend as much as $300 million to purchase up to 12 million courses of Ebola vaccines once a safe and effective vaccine is recommended by the World Health Organization. The international nonprofit is also putting up to $90 million toward rolling out the vaccines and rebuilding the health systems of countries affected by Ebola.

Sorrento Therapeutics will collaborate with technology developer NantWorks on antibody-based immunotherapies against cancer and autoimmune diseases. The partners will put $20 million into a joint venture, and a NantWorks affiliate will acquire a 19.9% stake in Sorrento.

Alexion has signed a drug discovery pact with X-Chem, which will use an ultralarge, high-diversity, DNA-encoded library to search for small molecules against Alexion-chosen targets. X-Chem gets an undisclosed up-front fee and milestones. Alexion will have full rights to any compounds that come out of the partnership.