Business Roundup

Formosa Plastics is closing its specialty polyvinyl chloride plant in Delaware City, Del., by the end of September. About 100 employees will be affected. Formosa says it will serve customers from its bigger, more efficient plant in Point Comfort, Texas.

BASF will spend close to $12 million to expand its capacity for isoindoline yellow pigments by about 70%. The firm says demand from the automotive and plastics industries is growing.

FMC has named its lithium materials business Livent. FMC plans to spin off the unit in an initial public offering before the end of this year.

Ascend Performance Materials has acquired Britannia Techno Polymer, a Dutch engineering plastics compounder. Ascend, a nylon 6,6 producer, says the purchase will expand its presence in the compounds business.

Cool Planet, an agriculture start-up based near Denver, has raised $20.3 million in new funding. The firm launched in 2009 with plans to make crude oil from wood via pyrolysis, but it shifted focus to a biochar soil amendment that it once considered a by-product.

Tokuyama will increase by 50% its capacity to make tetramethylammonium hydroxide, a photoresist developer used in the electronics industry. Increasing miniaturization of microchips will boost demand for the material, the company says.

Sutro Biopharma has landed $85.4 million in financing to advance its pipeline of cancer therapies. They include two antibody-drug conjugates known as STRO-001, now in Phase I clinical testing for lymphoma and multiple myeloma, and STRO-002, which is expected to enter clinical trials for ovarian and endometrial cancer by early 2019.

Causaly, an artificial intelligence software developer based in London and Athens, has secured $1 million in funding. The company is developing software that scans scientific literature to extract causal associations.