Business Roundup

Eastman Chemical will spend $12 million to expand window and paint protection film capacity at a plant in Martinsville, Va. The enlargement will create 15 new jobs.

Croda is building a $35 million plant in Hull, England, that will almost double its capacity for fatty acid amide-based polymer additives. The additives address issues such as friction, scratch resistance, and stability in plastics.

Anellotech says it has raised $800,000 from an undisclosed investor, bringing its funding to $3.2 million since October 2016. The start-up also says it has completed a successful test in Silsbee, Texas, of its biomass-based aromatics production process.

Waters Corp. and Wyatt Technology have entered a comarketing agreement that couples a Wyatt multiangle light-scattering detector with Waters’s ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography system. Customers will be able to determine the properties of polymers, peptides, and proteins without relying only on column calibration or reference standards, they say.

Eisai and Charles River Laboratories have extended a drug discovery pact focused on tropical and neurological diseases. The partners, which work out of Eisai’s research center in Hatfield, England, will now also collaborate with Medicines for Malaria Venture scientists.

Aslan Pharmaceuticals has raised $33 million from its initial public stock offering. The Singapore-based company, which focuses on treatments for tumors that are prevalent in Asia, has one drug candidate in clinical trials in the U.S.

Inthera Bioscience has raised close to $11 million in its first round of venture capital funding, led by Merck Ventures. The Swiss firm is developing cancer treatments based on small-molecule inhibitors of intracellular protein-protein interactions.

The Global Health Innovative Technology Fund has raised about $200 million from the Japanese government, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and other organizations to develop drugs for diseases prevalent in developing countries. Launched in 2013 with $100 million, the Japanese fund supports 61 projects, including six undergoing clinical trials.