Business digest

The Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the UK Ceramics Industry, Jo Gideon MP, has officially opened AMRICC (Applied Materials Research, Innovation, & Commercialisation Company), a new £10m research centre. The facility operates under an open-access format, translating materials, processes and technologies into real-world products and solutions by enabling product and process development to be carried out at an industrially relevant scale. It includes an equipment suite featuring over 350 pieces of high-value technology, collectively offering unique capabilities for users, coupled with the expertise of scientists, engineers, data scientists and computational modellers to turn innovative ideas into market-ready technologies.

UK car manufacturer INEOS Automotive and the Coatings division of German chemical manufacturer BASF have signed an agreement on a global automotive refinish body and paint development. The partners will commit to a long-term strategic collaboration that includes the supply of sustainable refinish solutions, expertise and the latest digital colour-matching solutions and training. INEOS is also collaborating with BASF Coatings as a partner in surface technology for its 4x4 offroad vehicle, the INEOS Grenadier, manufactured in Hambach, France, since 2021.

French medical biotech CellProthera, a regenerative cell therapy developer specialising in ischemic diseases, has announced a collaboration with stem cell researchers at Shonan Kamakura General Hospital (SKGH), Japan, to manufacture autologous endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) for forthcoming clinical trials. SKGH will deploy CellProthera’s StemXpand(R) automated manufacturing device and StemPack(R) single-use cell culture kits to produce clinical-grade autologous EPC therapies for patients with ischemic and renal diseases.

Finnish industrial machinery company Metso has installed a fully automated multi-purpose scrubber pilot plant at its R&D centre in Frankfurt, Germany. The new plant will be used for developing and optimising gas cleaning processes. The first focus will be on the development of simultaneous scrubbing of SO₂ and NO_x at low temperatures. The pilot plant features online sensors for the measurement of an extensive set of gas and liquid properties. The process control system will allow the development of reliable process models for designing industrial-sized plants and will support further process optimisation and advanced digitalisation solutions.

Fortum Battery Recycling, a subsidiary of Finnish energy company Fortum, and Hydrovolt, a Norwegian battery recycler have signed an agreement for the delivery of black mass (shredded battery material containing valuable metals such as lithium, copper, manganese, cobalt and nickel) to Fortum’s battery material recycling plant. Under the collaboration, Hydrovolt mechanically recycles EV batteries at its plant in Fredrikstad creating the black mass. This is then shipped to Fortum’s Harjavalta plant where hydrometallurgical processes recover metals used to produce new Li-ion batteries.

PharmaKure, a UK clinical-stage pharma developing precision medicines for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other neurodegenerative diseases, has announced a new epigenetics collaboration with Sheffield Hallam University. The partnership will focus on gene-based environmental biomarkers, known as epigenetic markers, for calculating risk scores for AD. The collaborative study aims to gain a better understanding of AD to help identify those more at risk of developing the disease, thereby enabling the provision of appropriate interventions much earlier in the disease pathology.

EnerSys, a US stored-energy systems and technology provider, has selected Greenville South Carolina, US, to build a Li-ion cell gigafactory.

UK Government Resources Minister Robbie Moore MP has announced that the UK will establish the world’s first UN-backed International Centre of Excellence on Sustainable Resource Management in the Circular Economy. The centre will develop sustainable approaches to the circular economy and resource efficiency to enable carbon reduction and the transition to a greener future. The UK will help countries across the world to maximise the environmental and economic opportunities the circular economy offers. Opening formally in April 2024, the centre will comprise five institutions: University College London, University of Exeter, Brunel University London, Swansea University and the British Geological Survey. The five participating institutions have together contributed £1.85m to fund the centre’s technical activities.

Dutch academic publisher and provider of information and data analytics Elsevier has signed a multi-year agreement with Iktos, a French company specialising in AI for new drug discovery. The partnership will strengthen Elsevier’s flagship chemical database Reaxys, which holds over a billion chemistry data points, by combining it with synthetic planning AI technologies developed by Iktos to accelerate chemistry research for pharmaceutical companies. The partnership aims to decrease the time required to complete Design-Make-Test-Analyse cycles of small molecules, thus reducing the length and cost of early-stage drug discovery.

Ubiquigent, a UK drug discovery and development company using novel deubiquitinase (DUB) modulators as new therapeutics for areas of high unmet medical need, has announced an agreement with UK pharma Nanna Therapeutics. Ubiquigent will provide Nanna with access to its DUB-focused drug discovery platform to support the development of therapeutics for human disease targets selected by Nanna.

Belgian chemicals maker Syensqo and TOMRA, a Norwegian provider of sensor-based sorting technology and solutions for the circular economy, have joined forces to demonstrate the technical and economic feasibility of separating and sorting multi-component plastic structures in which polyvinylidene chloride (PVDC) serves as a barrier layer. The partners developed experiments with multilayer samples of commercial packaging waste consisting of low-density polyethylene (LDPE) and PVDC. The results have proven that multilayer films containing PVDC can be separated from mixed plastic waste using industrial sorting equipment to achieve clean-grade polyolefin and PVDC recycling streams.

Lhyfe, a French producer and supplier of green and renewable hydrogen has received confirmation from the French Government for a grant of up to €149m for the construction of a green hydrogen production plant with an installed electrolysis capacity of 100MW near Le Havre, France. Once up and running, Lhyfe aims to produce up to 34t of green H2 per day.

Terumo Blood and Cell Technologies (Terumo BCT), a US medical technology company, and CiRA Foundation, a Japanese research organisation working on induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, have announced a partnership designed to boost the use of iPS cells for a range of new therapies. Using CiRA Foundation’s iPS cell knowledge and Terumo BCT’s enabling technologies and cell therapy manufacturing know-how, the companies seek to develop an automated workflow for iPS cell-derived therapies.

UK biotech NexaBiome has partnered with Slovenian CDMO JAFRAL to develop NexaBiome’s technology for industrial-scale production of immobilised bacteriophages. The agreement between the two companies will enable production capacity to be significantly ramped up – a hundredfold increase – creating the potential to treat millions of patients with phage-based therapies.

More than $30m is being invested by Dutch paints and performance coatings company AkzoNobel to install advanced technologies and increase total manufacturing capacity at its four powder coatings sites in North America. The company is incorporating new extruders, thermoplastics and bonding processes at its US facilities in Reading, Pennsylvania; Warsaw, Indiana; Nashville, Tennessee; plus, Monterrey in Mexico. It will unlock numerous benefits, such as increased production efficiency and expanded application capabilities.

BiomX, an Israeli clinical-stage biotech developing novel natural and engineered phage therapies that target specific pathogenic bacteria, has announced that it has entered into a definitive merger agreement with Adaptive Phage Therapeutics, a US clinical-stage biotech developing phage-based therapies to combat bacterial infections.

Neomorph, a US venture-backed biotech has announced it has entered into a collaboration and licensing agreement with Danish healthcare company Novo Nordisk to discover, develop and commercialise molecular glue degraders for cardiometabolic and rare diseases. Under the agreement, Neomorph will lead discovery and preclinical activities against selected targets, with Novo Nordisk having the right to exclusively pursue further clinical development and commercialisation of the compounds.

British-Swedish pharma and biotech AstraZeneca has entered into a definitive $2bn agreement to acquire Fusion Pharmaceuticals, a Canadian clinical-stage biopharma developing radioconjugates, a promising modality in cancer treatment. These medicines deliver a radioactive isotope directly to cancer cells through precise targeting using molecules such as antibodies, peptides or small molecules. This approach has potential advantages compared with traditional radiotherapy, including minimising damage to healthy cells and enabling access to tumours not reachable through external beam radiation.

Archroma, a Swiss producer of specialty chemicals for the textiles, paper and coatings markets, is bringing its entire portfolio of 5760 colours to the Pointcarre digital textile design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) system. Pointcarre Textile Software enables fashion, home furnishing and technical textiles designers to create accurate digital samples, streamline the fabric weaving, knitting and printing processes, and produce realistic presentations of their collections. All Archroma colour references can be formulated with dyes that meet international eco-standards.

Belgian chemicals maker Syensqo has announced the launch of Swyft-Ply, a new composite material for the electronic and smart devices market. It offers fast curing, strength, low weight and multiple material layers, making it ideal for designers who need new form factors that are not only thinner but also provide more design flexibility. It is also aimed at quick development cycle and high-volume manufacturing requirements.

Optibrium, a UK developer of software and AI solutions for drug discovery, has announced the launch of Semeta, a metabolism prediction platform tailored specifically for drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics scientists. Semeta aims to improve a drug’s chance of clinical success by making predictions of Phase 1 and 2 metabolic routes, sites, products and liabilities in early drug discovery.

German thermoplastic elastomers (TPE) manufacturer Kraiburg has released a range of products that contain at least 73% recycled content. Its new Recycling Content TPE for Automotive series has been designed to fulfil a variety of technical applications across a range of hardness values using a recipe with recycled raw materials that offers a 25% reduction in carbon footprint.