Business Roundup

MyForest has raised $15 million in series A funding to help boost sales of its fungal bacon, which is currently available only in New York City. The firm has also hired food industry executive Greg Shewchuk as CEO.

Kraton has appointed Marcello Boldrini as CEO. Boldrini has been the company’s co-CEO with Holger Jung as well as CEO of Kraton Pine Chemicals since March 2022, when DL Chemical of South Korea closed its acquisition of Kraton.

BASF has opened a biodegradation and microplastics laboratory in Wyandotte, Michigan. The firm says the site will help customers analyze the environmental fate of established and emerging materials.

Röhm expects to close its methacrylates plant in Westwego, Louisiana, in June 2025, after the firm opens a new plant for the business in Bay City, Texas. The closure will affect 70 employees.

Open Targets, a UK-based public-private partnership that uses human genetics and genomics data to select drug targets, has appointed David Hulcoop its new executive director. Hulcoop’s background includes developing large-scale pharmaceutical production processes for GSK.

Seqens, a French producer of pharmaceutical ingredients, will build a new plant to increase its capacity for making pharmaceutical polymers and lipids at its site in Aramon, France. Construction of the plant, which will cost $16.3 million, is due for completion in the second quarter of 2024.

Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will fund a GSK tuberculosis vaccine through late-stage development. The Phase 3 trial will assess the vaccine’s ability to prevent the latent infection progressing to pulmonary tuberculosis.

AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo announced that their antibody-drug conjugate for non-small-cell lung cancer, datopotamab deruxtecan, met one of two primary endpoints during Phase 3 clinical trials but also resulted in patient deaths. AstraZeneca’s stock prices dropped 9% on the NASDAQ and 6% on the London Stock Exchange right after the announcement.

BioMarin’s Roctavian has become the first gene therapy for adults with hemophilia A to be approved by the US. The virus-delivered treatment involves replacing the function of the mutated gene to allow patients to produce the missing factor VIII protein for blood clotting.