Business Roundup

Pilot Chemical has acquired Liquid Minerals Group, a Texas-based maker of magnesium carboxylate and sulfonate fuel additives. Pilot, which calls itself the world’s largest producer of disulfonates, says the purchase will extend opportunities for its surfactants and antimicrobial businesses.

Monsanto has signed a multiyear agreement to supply DuPont with a low-volatility dicamba herbicide formulation for use in the U.S. and Canada. The herbicide is intended for farmers planting Monsanto’s Roundup Ready Xtend soybeans, which are genetically modified to tolerate dicamba and glyphosate.

Siluria Technologies has completed a Series E round of financing, raising more than $45 million. The funding round’s lead investor was Saudi Arabia’s National Petrochemical Industrial Co. San Francisco-based Siluria is developing methane-to-ethylene technology.

Merck KGaA has signed a deal enabling it to offer its customers PCAS’s range of 38 biodegradable polymers for sustained release of small-molecule and select peptide drugs. Under the agreement, Merck becomes the sole global distributor for the French firm’s Expansorb brand of polymers.

Evotec, the German pharma services firm, will work with the nonprofit Antibiotic Research UK on treating antibiotic-resistant infections. They will seek “resistance breakers” that can help restore the utility of existing antibiotics. Work will be done at Evotec sites in England and France.

Apax Partners, a U.K.-based private equity firm, has acquired two European generic drug companies: Spain’s Invent Farma and Germany’s Neuraxpharm. Apax says it seeks to consolidate the European generics market.

Sorrento Therapeutics and the French drugmaker Servier are joining to develop cancer treatments using Sorrento’s anti-PD-1 antibody STI-A1110. Servier will pay Sorrento $28 million up front and potentially more in milestones.

Bayer and X-Chem have expanded a pact to give Bayer greater access to X-Chem’s DEX drug discovery engine, which is based on a library of more than 120 billion molecules. Founded in 2009, X-Chem uses iterative combinatorial synthesis to generate its molecules.