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The battery recycler Ascend Elements will work with the fluorine chemical firm Koura—whose parent company, Orbia, has invested in Ascend—to commercialize technology for recycling graphite anode material in batteries. Some battery recycling processes can recover graphite, but Ascend claims that the product isn’t usually pure enough for batteries. Graphite has received less attention from recyclers because it’s less valuable than cathode metals like cobalt, lithium, and nickel. Orbia is also working with Ascend to recycle fluorine chemicals in batteries.

South Korea’s SK Chemicals and Sonopress, the manufacturing subsidiary of the German media company Bertelsmann, have developed a material for making records that might replace the polyvinyl chloride used for decades. The new records are made from recycled polyethylene terephthalate, which SK processes chemically at a plant in China. Sonopress has been trying to find an alternative to vinyl for 2 years; for the new record, it developed an injection molding machine that exerts a pressure of 300 metric tons.

China’s commerce ministry has put the world’s battery industry on notice by restricting the export of some graphite materials that are used to make anodes for lithium-ion batteries. The move is calling attention to China’s dominance of the market and providing a push to establish graphite processing outside the country.

Graphite anodes can be produced from synthetic graphite—made by heating petroleum coke—or from mined graphite flakes. Graphite flakes must be milled into spherical particles and then coated with carbon. Both forms are mixed with binders to create a battery anode.

Starting in December, companies in China will have to get permission to export some forms of natural and synthetic graphite materials that are used to make anodes.

Over 60% of the world’s mined graphite and nearly half of synthetic graphite is produced in China, according to the US Geological Survey. The country also dominates processing steps further down the supply chain. The research firm Benchmark Mineral Intelligence estimates that Chinese firms produce 99% of spherical graphite and 93% of all graphite anode materials.

James Willoughby, a graphite analyst with the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, says the restriction demonstrates China’s control of the graphite market but may not significantly slow battery makers outside China.

Over the summer, the country placed similar restrictions on the export of gallium and germanium. While that caused a slowdown in trade for several months, exports have started again, Willoughby says. “It doesn’t seem like they’ve turned off the tap,” he says. “They just wanted to sort of show that they have control.” He says the graphite market might follow a similar path.

Even before the export restrictions, several companies had announced intentions to establish graphite mining and processing or anode material production outside China.

Westwater Resources is planning a graphite mine and processing facility in Alabama. With financial support from the US government, Syrah Resources is nearing completion of a plant in Louisiana that will produce anode material from natural graphite. The company says it already has customers. Both firms expect Chinese export restrictions to boost their business.

Graphex Technologies is building facilities in Michigan that will produce spherical and carbon-coated natural graphite. CEO John DeMaio says the Chinese restrictions only emphasize the need for what the company already has planned. “We saw the size of the opportunity here in North America,” he says. “We knew there was going to be a need for a localized supply chain.”

But it won’t be easy for battery makers to transition to a battery anode supply chain that avoids China, according to Daisy Jennings-Gray, an analyst with Benchmark. She says it will take a long time to build anode production capacity and get the material qualified by battery makers.

“This announcement has certainly put graphite, and anodes, on the radar in the West,” she says. “There won’t be a quick pivot away from the reliance on graphite and anodes from China.”

Gene editing company Beam Therapeutics became the latest biotech to announce staff layoffs Oct. 19. The firm plans to lose 100 employees–20% of its workforce. The company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, also says it will cut back on its pipeline. The cost savings from these changes will keep the lights on into 2026, the company says.

Chemist David R. Liu at the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard, launched Beam in May 2018, two years after Liu’s lab developed base editors, the company’s key technology. Base editors deliver a twist on traditional CRISPR-Cas gene editing to make single nucleotide base changes in DNA. In theory, this technology enables the treatment of genetic diseases with more precision and with fewer off-target effects.

But despite base editing’s potential, it’s taking time for the technology to yield a clinical product. Beam’s restructuring will pause the development of an in vivo treatment for hepatitis B virus. The company will also seek partners for further developing its CAR T-cell immunotherapy for T-cell leukemia and T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma.

Instead, Beam will focus on its leading therapeutic candidate, a base editing therapy for sickle cell disease (SCD), and a second therapy that delivers hematopoietic stem cells to treat SCD. Investors have largely focused on the former, for which early clinical data should emerge early next year, sayss Sami Corwin, an analyst at William Blair, in a note to investors. Beam will also continue to pursue a base editor therapy for a metabolic disease called Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, for which it aims to submit regulatory applications in the first quarter of 2024.

A handful of other companies are developing gene therapies for sickle cell disease and two firms have already gone to the US Food and Drug Administration for approval of their products. That could limit the market for Beam’s alternative and the base editing platform will be critical to Beam differentiating itself, Corwin sayss.

It has been a tough year for layoffs in the industry; 119 biopharma firms had cut staff by Aug. 18 this year, matching the number for the whole of 2022, according to analysis by Fierce Biotech.

“In this challenging market environment,” says John Evans, CEO of Beam, in a statement accompanying the announcement, “we need to make the difficult decision to focus our resources on those clinical programs and research areas we believe have the highest potential for near-term value creation, while continuing to build a strong company for the future.”

As part of a decade-long effort to level the playing field for investigators seeking money to pursue biomedical research, the US National Institutes of Health is simplifying its grant review process. Expertise and resources—two factors that can lead to potential reputation bias—will be evaluated for sufficiency but will no longer get a numerical score, the agency announced Oct. 19.

The new framework, which goes into effect for grant applications received on or after Jan. 25, 2025, is designed to give more weight to the importance, rigor, and feasibility of a proposed research project. Such factors will continue to be scored numerically.

“Studies have shown that consideration of reputation of the institution or investigator in the grant review process could affect assessment of scientific merit, potentially giving reputation greater weight than other factors,” Lawrence Tabak, acting director of the NIH, says in a statement. “Ultimately, the potential impact of ideas on advancing science should outweigh the reputation of who is applying and where they work.”

The NIH has been struggling for years to make its grant review process fair and to ensure that peer review panels choose the best research proposals. The new framework also shifts some of the administrative burden from peer reviewers to NIH staff to allow reviewers to focus more on the science.

The NIH says it will consider feedback on the new framework. It will also collect data to evaluate the impact of the changes over time so that it can improve the process as needed.

Shell Chemicals Europe has filed a claim for approximately $1 billion in damages in the District Court of Amsterdam against four companies that the European Commission found in 2020 to be operating a buyer’s cartel for ethylene. One of the companies, Clariant, issued a statement rejecting the allegations, claiming that Shell was not one of its ethylene suppliers.

The EC that year found that Clariant, Celanese, Orbia, and Westlake Chemical fixed the price they paid for ethylene in Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands between December 2011 and March 2017. Clariant was fined $175 million, Celanese $93 million, and Orbia $25 million.

Westlake would also have been fined for price-fixing had it not alerted the commission to the cartel activities.

“As a supplier of ethylene to the European market, we have a significant claim against the companies that were found by the European Commission to be operating a buyer’s cartel,” Shell says in a statement on its filing. “We have started litigation proceedings against them to recover these substantial damages from the impact their price manipulation has had on our business.”

In a statement responding to Shell’s Oct. 18 filing, Clariant says it “rejects the allegation and will adamantly defend its position in the proceedings.” Clariant adds that it possesses “substantiated economic evidence that the conduct of the parties did not produce any effect on the market.”

Celanese, Orbia, and Westlake did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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