Business Roundup

Ashland has completed the $1 billion sale of its composites business to Ineos. The sale includes a butanediol plant in Marl, Germany.

LGC has acquired Toronto Research Chemicals, which makes synthetic organic biochemicals used as reference standards. TRC has 375 employees and operates two manufacturing sites in Toronto.

AgroSpheres, based in Charlottesville, Virginia, has raised $4 million in its first round of funding from Ospraie Ag Science and the venture arm of Wilbur-Ellis. The start-up will use the funds to develop and commercialize its fermentation-derived, protective encapsulate for biobased and synthetic pesticides.

Nkarta Therapeutics, a company developing engineered natural killer (NK) cell therapies, raised $114 million in series B financing to support its two lead programs for solid tumors and blood cancer. Nkarta is building a manufacturing facility for its NK-cell therapies in South San Francisco.

Repare Therapeutics, a biotech company using synthetic lethality to identify new drug targets for cancer, raised $82.5 million in series B financing. It plans to begin testing its lead drug candidate, a small-molecule inhibitor of a DNA damage-sensing protein called ATR, in humans next year.

Universal Display has formed a strategic partnership with LG Chem to develop and commercialize red, green, and yellow organic light-emitting diode host materials. Universal signed a collaboration with Merck KGaA earlier this summer.

DuPont Sustainable Solutions has completed its spin-off from DuPont. The business consults with manufacturers, airlines, utilities, and other kinds of companies about safety performance and has annual sales of about $170 million.

BASF has broken ground on a manufacturing site in Pinghu, China, for its Chemetall surface treatment chemicals, a business in its coatings division. BASF expects the new site to be operational in the first quarter of 2021.