The board and shareholders of Hovione have named Dr Jean-Luc Herbeaux (right) as CEO from 1 April. He had originally joined the firm as COO in May 2020, after multiple leadership positions at Evonik, where he last headed the Health Care business line.

BASF is building a new world-scale plant for alkylethanolamines at the verbund site in Antwerp, Belgium, one of four sites where it already producest them. This will increase the firm’s global capacity by nearly 30% to 140,000 tonnes/year. Start-up is planned for 2024

The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) has brought forward a proposal to ban all per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) in fire-fighting foams in the EU. A six-month consultation period with stakeholders will begin on 23 March.

This follows an investigation the agency carried out at the request of the European Commission into the strengths and weaknesses of five different options. It concluded that the risks posed by PFASs are currently not adequately controlled and that releases should be minimised.

Mosaic and BioConsortia, which are both based in California, have entered into and agreement to develop and launch the latter’s nitrogen-fixing microbial products for all crops, including corn, wheat, rice, fruit and vegetables, in China, India, Thailand and Vietnam.

This follows a collaboration to develop these products for the Americas at the end of 2020 and successful field trials in the US and Canada. Fertiliser producer Mosaic already has sales channels in place in the region.

Quotient Sciences, a UK-based firm that describes itself as a “drug development and manufacturing accelerator”, has integrated drug substance into its flagship Translational Pharmaceutics platform, uniting it with drug product and clinical testing activities within one organisation under a single project manager. This follows a year after the acquisition of the former Arcinova site at Alnwick.

ChemForward, a US specialist in chemical hazard data, has introduced its Safer programme, through which raw material suppliers can verify safer alternatives and market them by trade name on the B2B marketplaces of Novi Connect and ChemSec Marketplace, plus a data sharing relationship with Covalo.

Portuguese CDMO Hovione, whose key technical specialities include spray drying and particle engineering, has concluded a strategic partnership under which it will market and commercialise Zerion’s solubility enhancement technology platform, Dispersome. Zerion was spun out from the University of Copenhagen in 2019, following a decade of research.