Business Roundup

Arzeda has raised $12 million in a series A round of funding led by OS Fund. The Seattle-based firm uses computational and ­synthetic biology to create enzymes and chemicals in “cell factories.” Arzeda says it will use the money to scale up its high-throughput computing and lab screening capacity.

Clariant has joined Kopernikus, a renewable energy initiative of the German government. Clariant catalysts will be used in a storage technology in which hydrogen is chemically bound through catalytic hydrogenation and then released via catalytic dehydrogenation.

GreenMantra Technologies has raised $3 million from Closed Loop Fund, a social impact investment fund, to help it expand a one-year-old plant in Ontario that converts postconsumer and postindustrial plastics into high-value waxes. The firm expects the project to be complete next year.

Asahi Kasei will boost its capacity in Singapore for solution-polymerized styrene butadiene rubber by 30% to 130,000 metric tons per year. The company also produces the material, prized in the production of fuel-efficient tires, in Japan.

Astellas is winding down its Agensys research operations in Santa Monica, Calif., as it reduces its focus on antibody-drug conjugate research. The Japanese drug firm acquired Agensys in 2007 for $387 million.

Sanofi has licensed certain of Ablynx’s Nanobodies—therapeutic proteins based on single-domain antibody fragments—for the treatment of immune-mediated inflammatory disease. Ablynx will get about $27 million up front plus $9 million in research funding.

STA Pharmaceutical, a manufacturing division of WuXi AppTec, has signed a five-year agreement to supply Tesaro with starting and intermediate materials for its ovarian cancer drug Zejula. FDA approved Zejula in March.

CARB-X, a U.S.-U.K. partnership for new antibiotics, is distributing up to $17.6 million in a second round of R&D funding. The money will go to Achaogen, Antabio, Bugworks Research, Debiopharm, EligoChem, Iterum Therapeutics, and VenatoRx Pharmaceuticals.