Business Roundup

Hanwha Total Petrochemical will spend $300 million to expand polyethylene capacity in Daesan, South Korea, by 50% to 1.1 million metric tons per year. Set to be completed in 2019, the expansion will complement an ongoing project at the site to start using propane feedstock.

Cornerstone Chemical is licensing hydrogen cyanide technology from Chemours. Cornerstone will decide next year whether to use the technology to build another hydrogen cyanide plant in Waggaman, La.

Lubrizol and the University of Pittsburgh’s department of chemical and petroleum engineering have received a U.S. Department of Energy grant to develop energy efficiency and productivity improvement methods. The $7.5 million project includes financial contributions from Lubrizol and the school.

Mitsui Chemicals and BASF will commercialize broflanilide, a broad-useinsecticide with a new mode of action. The chemical, discovered and developed by the two firms, interrupts a GABA-gated chloride channel in the motor neurons of insects.

Asilomar Bio, a start-up developing crop yield-enhancing chemicals, has raised $12 million in a second round of funding from the venture arms of Syngenta and Wilbur-Ellis. Asilomar’s first product is intended to help plants better use water and nutrients in the soil.

Solvay will increase its production of natural vanillin, made from rice bran, by 60 metric tons per year. While most vanillin is made from petroleum precursors, companies are increasingly seeking out natural vanillin.

NorthSea Therapeutics has launched with nearly $30 million in funding to develop icosabutate for nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, a liver disease. NorthSea licensed icosabutate, which has already completed Phase II studies as a treatment for high levels of triglycerides, from Pronova BioPharma Norge.

Amgen has tapped Berkeley, Calif.-based Carmot Therapeutics for a Parkinson’s disease drug discovery partnership potentially worth $240 million in milestones. Carmot’s technology, chemotype evolution, is a type of fragment-based drug discovery.