Business Watch: BioBTX moves on renewable aromatics; Scribe’s IPO is a hit

Karen S. Carter conducted her first analyst conference call as CEO of Dow last week. The company reported strong results due to higher prices and Dow’s own cost-cutting efforts.

What I was looking for during the call was evidence for new directions she might take the company after succeeding Jim Fitterling. Fortunately, Carter did name her three top priorities.

One is “focused growth and innovation,” including an emphasis on “targeted innovation.” She cited Dow’s new Coolant Care Network, which is meant to provide analytical services to data centers and leverage Dow’s products in the sector, such as heat transfer fluids.

The second, “enhancing portfolio competitiveness,” includes “taking action where we are no longer competitive.” This could foreshadow Dow divesting assets.

The third priority is a “balanced approach to capital allocation.” Difficult to see anything new here, because most companies say they want to do this.

Are these directions new? The innovation and portfolio competitiveness points are both interesting, but it is difficult to know what to expect. Dow has always conducted a lot of R&D. Likewise, without proposed deals, we won’t know if the company has a revolutionary transformation in the works.

Questions? Comments? Tips? Send them to me, senior correspondent Alex Tullo, at [email protected].

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Business in brief

BASF joins Pirelli, Pyrum, and Synthos for tire-to-tire recycling

A quartet of European companies has launched a project that aims to turn scrap tires into new ones. Under the initiative, German recycling company Pyrum Innovations will use its pyrolysis process to convert end-of-life tires into recovered carbon black (rCB) and tire pyrolysis oil (TPO). The rCB will be directly reintroduced into the manufacturing of new tires at the Italian tire company Pirelli. Meanwhile, BASF will feed the TPO into petrochemical processes that make products such as butadiene and styrene. The synthetic rubber maker Synthos will then convert BASF’s materials into synthetic rubber for Pirelli’s high-performance tires, closing the loop. The project “reflects that genuine product circularity cannot be achieved by a single company acting alone,” BASF says in a press release. “It requires creating industrial ecosystems involving players with complementary expertise, each contributing to different phases of the transformation process around a shared material loop.”

—Vanessa Zainzinger

BioBTX moves ahead with renewable aromatics plant

The Dutch chemical recycling firm BioBTX has made a final investment decision to build what it says will be the world’s first commercial-scale plant that converts mixed plastics waste directly into renewable aromatic chemicals. Construction will begin in early in 2027 in Delfzijl, the Netherlands; the plant is expected to start up in mid-2028. It will produce about 10,000 metric tons (t) per year of benzene, toluene, and xylenes, as well as 8,000 t of by-products. The company claims its process can reduce life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions by 70–80% compared with fossil-derived aromatics. BioBTX’s progress reflects the industry’s increased interest in using chemical recycling to produce high-value feedstock chemicals, and aromatics are key raw materials for plastics, coatings, pharmaceuticals, and adhesives.

—Ana Georgescu

Daicel, Formosa Plastics join forces for semiconductor materials

The Japanese chemical maker Daicel and Formosa Plastics are forming a joint venture. The companies haven’t said specifically what they intend to produce, but a Daicel statement says the venture will have “the aim of contributing to the development of the semiconductor industry and regional economic growth.” It will be headquartered in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, Formosa’s home city. Formosa is mostly a producer of commodity petrochemicals and plastics. Daicel is a diversified chemical producer that makes materials for semiconductor manufacturing, including polymers for photoresists and solvents.

—Alex Tullo

Eurodia raises funds for separation science

Starquest Capital and Yotta Capital Partners are investing a combined $20 million in the separation and purification specialist Eurodia Industrie. Eurodia works with industrial-scale electrodialysis, chromatography, membranes, and absorption media, primarily in aqueous settings that include lithium extraction, mine waste upcycling, carbon dioxide capture, biobased chemicals, and process electrification. Industrial decarbonization has been booming, and Eurodia says its revenue grew from $39 million in 2023 to $91 million in 2025. In a press release, the firm says it will use the investment money to scale up both the number and size of projects it can take on. The funding is being made under Article 9 of the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, a framework and set of metrics in the European Union designed to combat greenwashing.

—Craig Bettenhausen

Fluor wins contract for aromatics complex in Bahrain

Gulf Petrochemical Industries (GPI) has awarded the engineering firm Fluor a contract to design a new aromatics complex in Bahrain. The plant will have the capacity to make 1.2 million metric tons (t) of p-xylene and 500,000 t per year of benzene annually. GPI is a joint venture of Bahrain’s Bapco Energies, Sabic Agri-Nutrients, and Kuwait’s Petrochemical industries Company. GPI already produces methanol, ammonia, and urea at its Bahrain site.

—Alex Tullo

Harena Rare Earths gets US government funding

The US government continues to pour support into the rare earth industry. The US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) is offering Harena Rare Earths up to $4.8 million for a mining project in Madagascar. Harena hopes to extract rare earths from an ionic clay deposit, a type of soil that often contains high amounts of heavy rare earths like dysprosium and terbium. Currently, most heavy rare earths are extracted by Chinese companies operating in Asia. Harena plans to use the funding for permitting, environmental studies, and development of a pilot plant. The funding follows a wave of US government support for rare earth projects. Last year, the DFC provided $5 million each for Aclara Resources’ rare earth mine in Brazil and Mkango Resources’ mine in Malawi. And in February, the organization offered $565 million for Serra Verde’s rare earth mine in Brazil. The US government has also invested heavily in rare earth processing firms.

—Matt Blois

BASF starts registration for fendioxypyracil

BASF is submitting registration dossiers for the new herbicide fendioxypyracil to regulators in Brazil and Australia. Fendioxypyracil, which BASF intends to market under the name Replexor Active, kills weeds by inhibiting the protoporphyrinogen oxidase (PPO) enzyme, the same mode of action employed by herbicides like trifludimoxazin and saflufenacil. Most PPO herbicides primarily target broadleaf weeds, but BASF says fendioxypyracil is also effective against grasses. It says there are few instances of grasses evolving resistance to PPO herbicides, which makes fendioxypyracil a good option for grasses resistant to other types of chemicals. BASF hopes to submit registration filings for the US and Argentina in 2027.

—Matt Blois

Quote of the week

German government ropes in Ukraine’s Enamine to find new antibiotics

The German government has launched a new public-private partnership, called Antares, to identify and develop new antibiotics using artificial intelligence. The partnership, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space, will be built on a collaboration between the Fraunhofer Institute for Translational Medicine and Pharmacology and Enamine Germany, a subsidiary of the Ukrainian chemical company Enamine. The partnership will use generative models to propose new molecular structures with antibiotic activity. “The AI models will be trained and tested using publicly available datasets, providing a low-risk approach to optimize the most suitable model,” Enamine Germany says in a press release.

—Aayushi Pratap

Schrödinger launches agentic AI for researchers

The New York–based computational chemistry company Schrödinger has launched an early-access version of Bunsen, its agentic artificial intelligence coscientist. The platform is geared toward helping scientists develop research objectives and workflows, as well as analyze and interpret the data for new molecular discovery. “Unlike general-purpose AI systems that only retrieve and summarize existing scientific information, Bunsen is optimized to execute Schrödinger’s validated computational methods and leverages decades of the company’s physics-based molecular discovery expertise,” Schrödinger says in a press release. To operate Bunsen, users will have access to AI platforms that include Nvidia’s BioNeMo ToolKit and Google Cloud’s elastic computing infrastructure, the release adds.

—Aayushi Pratap

Argenx to buy Forte Biosciences for $2.2 billion

The biotechnology firm Argenx has agreed to acquire Forte Biosciences, a fellow developer of drug candidates for immunological diseases, in a deal worth $2.2 billion. Anchoring the acquisition is a drug candidate called FB102, an antibody targeting the cell surface protein CD122. Forte is developing it for vitiligo and celiac disease and says it could address multiple other autoimmune diseases as well. At Argenx, FB102 will join a drug development pipeline that includes potential treatments for ocular myasthenia gravis, primary immune thrombocytopenia, and Graves’ disease, among other rare illnesses.

—Rowan Walrath

Scribe goes public and brings in $129 million

Scribe Therapeutics, a gene therapy company launched by Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, has raised $129 million in its initial public offering. The firm issued 8.6 million shares at $15 a piece, outperforming the company’s own expectations. It will trade on the Nasdaq Global Market under the ticker symbol SCTX. Scribe’s lead drug candidate, STX-1150, is an in vivo gene therapy that silences the PCSK9 gene, helping lower cholesterol. But PCSK9 is a popular target. The US Food and Drug Administration has already approved several nongene therapy drugs that inhibit the gene, including Merck & Co.’s oral PCSK9 inhibitor Lipfendra. Scribe also has gene therapies in development targeting the APOC3 and LPA genes, among other undisclosed targets related to cardiovascular disease.

—Max Barnhart

GSK to quit Stevenage site in favor of Cambridge

On a second-quarter earnings call with investors, GSK CEO Luke Miels announced that GSK will be leaving its historic UK site in Stevenage for the growing Cambridge Biomedical Campus, which is also home to Astra Zeneca, Addenbrookes Hospital, and numerous biotechnology firms. GSK’s new research and development center is under construction there and will eventually be the workplace of 1,000 GSK scientists. Many of them will have moved from the company’s R&D site in Stevenage, which is scheduled to close by 2029. The Cambridge labs will focus on oncology, respiratory, hepatology, vaccines, and HIV. At the same time, GSK’s Ware site will be upgraded to focus on drug development and manufacturing scale-up. The moves are part of the firm’s roughly $500 million investment in UK life sciences over 3 years.

—Laura Howes

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