Roundup

Bayer says board member Werner Baumann, who joined the firm in 1998, will succeed Marijn Dekkers as chairman on May 1. Dekkers, Bayer’s chairman since 2010, is stepping down to take the helm of the consumer products company Unilever.

Saudi Aramco is building a high-throughput experimentation lab in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, using equipment purchased from the German firm HTE. Aramco, one of the world’s largest oil companies, says the heterogeneous catalysis lab will expand its research involvement in chemicals.

Merck & Co. has licensed the rights to AureoGen Biosciences’ derivatives of the antifungal aureobasidin A. AureoGen says it used its chemistry platform to modify aureobasidin A to better combat fungal pathogens, including Aspergillus fumigatus, a mold that is getting better at evading existing azole antifungals.

Perstorp, a Swedish specialty chemical maker, plans to build a pentaerythritol plant in India’s Maharashtra state. Pentaerythritol is used to produce alkyd resins for coatings, radiation-curing monomers, polyurethanes, and other products. Perstorp already produces the alcohol in Europe and the U.S.

Toray Industries and Toyota Tsusho, an affiliate of Toyota, will test a method for recycling carbon fiber by thermal decomposition. The partners plan to set up a pilot plant in Handa, Japan, that will demonstrate the technology with a view to commercializing it.

Recipharm has agreed to acquire Mitim, a contract development and manufacturing organization based in Italy, in a deal worth about $75 million. Privately owned, Mitim specializes in the filling of injectable β-lactam products. It had sales last year of $47 million.

AAIPharma Services/Cambridge Major Laboratories will spend more than $10 million to relocate its St. Louis pharmaceutical analytical testing facility to the city’s Cortex Innovation Community. The company says the project is in response to increased outsourcing of chemical and microbiological analytical testing.

Consort Medical and Precision Ocular have formed a development and manufacturing agreement focused on Precision’s drugs and drug delivery systems, which are designed to access small spaces in the eye. The pact will involve Consort’s Bespak device development business and Aesica, the drug services firm Consort acquired in 2014.