Business Roundup

Chevron Phillips Chemical says it is evaluating the construction of a world-scale plant for 1-hexene, a polyethylene comonomer. The company operates two 1-hexene plants in the Middle East and opened one in Cedar Bayou, Texas, in 2014.

Elevance Renewable Sciences will supply Stahl, a maker of coatings and leather chemicals, with polyols made with olefin metathesis. Stahl will use the polyols to produce polyurethane coatings for flexible substrates.

Lanxess plans to expand benzyl alcohol capacity in Krefeld-Uerdingen, Germany, by 30% by the end of this year. The chemical is used in industry and as a food and personal care preservative. Lanxess also plans to expand capacity in Nagda, India.

Bruker has acquired Arxspan, a provider of software for managing research data. The deal follows Bruker’s December purchase of most of Mestrelab Research, a maker of software for managing chemical information.

Solvay has invested an undisclosed sum in Noble.AI, a developer of software intended to help R&D organizations speed up innovation. Solvay says it will use Noble.AI tools in its own research.

Springer Nature has sold its InfoChem chemical data-management and synthesis-prediction software business to DeepMatter Group. Springer Nature already holds a minority interest in DeepMatter, a data analysis company.

Ono Pharmaceutical has signed a neurological disease drug-discovery agreement with twoXAR, a Mountain View, California–based start-up. twoXAR will use artificial intelligence to suggest a set of lead compounds; Ono can develop and commercialize the resulting drugs.

Sun Pharma Advanced Research Company of Mumbai, India, will work with HitGen to develop small-molecule drug candidates for certain targets. Chengdu, China–based HitGen will use its DNA-encoded library technology—a way of swiftly screening millions of compounds that are tagged with DNA—to look for compounds.