Business Roundup

Clariant has agreed to acquire the 70% it does not already own of Beraca, a Brazilian personal care specialties firm, from the Sabará family. Beraca claims to collect and extract fats, oils, and botanical ingredients in an environmentally sustainable way. It has 90 employees and annual sales of $15 million.

Raven SR has received $20 million in investment from companies including Chevron and Itochu. Wyoming-based Raven has a steam–carbon dioxide reformation process for making hydrogen from organic waste that it plans to roll out for the first time in California.

Sumitomo Chemical plans to build a pilot polymethyl methacrylate recycling plant at its site in Niihama, Japan, by the end of 2022. The plant will use a pyrolysis process to break down the acrylic resin into its monomer, methyl methacrylate.

Stora Enso, a wood products firm, has opened a pilot facility in Sunila, Finland, that uses lignin separated from wood to make a material for anodes for electric vehicle batteries. The facility cost $12 million.

Ginkgo Bioworks will use its cell-programming technology to help the start-up Huue improve its microbe-based process for making the denim dye indigo. The firms say they expect indigo will get to Huue’s partners later this year or next year.

Lonza will build an aseptic drug fill-and-finish line at its mammalian cell–based biologics facility in Guangzhou, China, which began operation earlier this year. The line is expected to be completed next year and to add 150 jobs at the Swiss firm’s site.

Elixiron Immunotherapeutics has raised $27 million in series A1 financing that it will use to advance the Phase 1 clinical trials of two drugs in its pipeline. One of them, EI-1071, is a small-molecule colony-stimulating factor 1 receptor inhibitor for Alzheimer’s disease.

Jnana Therapeutics has raised $50 million in series B financing to advance a small-molecule drug for phenylketonuria into the clinic. The start-up will also expand its chemoproteomics platform for discovering drugs that target solute carrier proteins.