In this week’s Chemistry in its element podcast, Tim Harrison from the University of Bristol talks about the Jekyll and Hyde element: chlorine

Thanks to James Weeks of SeparationsNOW, a Wiley-Blackwell website for separation scientists, here’s some more info on the Pittcon Editor’s Awards and the award winners, who are discussing their instruments with Chemistry World’s Matt Wilkinson and ISC’s Eileen Skelly Frame. This year the awards were kindly sponsored by ISC Publications, Instrument News and Chemistry World.

Introduction

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8 March 2010: Have something to say about an article you’ve read on Chemistry World this week? Leave your comments below…

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The March edition of our popular Classic kit column seems to have caused some consternation. The article describes the Vernier scale - which is used to measure distances or angles very precisely - and the man, Pierre Vernier, by whom it was invented.

Included with the piece was an illustration of a Vernier scale (reproduced below), along with the reading of 1.02mm as judged by us here at Chemistry World towers. As the editor of this page and the one who wrote the caption, I have to put my hand up and take responsibility for what does seem to be an erroneous reading - which a couple of keen-eyed readers have pointed out.

Before you read any further, why not have a go at reading the scale yourself - write down your answer and then look below to see whether you’re right.

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AstraZeneca to close Charnwood and Lund sites

Well, unless you’ve been half asleep this week, you’ll almost certainly have heard that AstraZeneca (AZ) has firmed up some of the details of the major restructuring and job cuts it announced at the end of January. The official word from the company is that it will be closing several sites and concentrating its R&D efforts on a narrower profile of disease areas.

The company’s R&D sites at Charnwood near Loughborough, UK, and Lund, Sweden, will be closed, with some employees moving to Alderley Park and Macclesfield in Cheshire, UK, and Mölndal, Sweden. The Avlon site near Bristol, UK, will cease pharmaceutical development and become purely a manufacturing facility. In the US, the site in Wilmington, Delaware, will end its early-stage discovery research, with some staff transferring to Boston, Massachussetts.

As the company said in January, not all of these jobs will be lost – about half of the 3,500 ‘affected’ R&D positions will be transferred elsewhere within the company.

A couple of AZ’s subsidiaries are also facing the axe – KuDOS in Cambridge, UK, is to close and the company are looking to sell Arrow Therapeutics in London.

In terms of research areas, the company has said that it is dropping research into thrombosis; acid reflux; ovarian and bladder cancers; systemic scleroderma; schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety; hepatitis C and vaccines other than respiratory syncytial virus and influenza. Some of these might come as a surprise to some readers, as AZ’s track record in a few of these diseases is pretty good – its thrombosis therapy Brilinta (ticagrelor) is currently heading through the FDA approval process after a solid Phase III performance and is predicted to become a blockbuster.

In response to the announcement, Lord Drayson, the UK’s science andinnovation minister said ‘I’m obviously disappointed that AstraZeneca is closing Charnwood, but the announcement that Alderley Park will become one of AZ’s top three global R&D sites shows that the UK remains an attractive location for investment in pharmaceuticals.’

Meanwhile, it’s one of the calendar highlights for analytical and instrument companies this week, with the annual Pittsburgh conference – affectionately known as Pittcon – running in Florida, US. Our very own commercial chemist, Matt Wilkinson, has been there all week and you can see the full lowdown in his blog posts.

PHARMACEUTICALS

Dimebon bombs out

Hopes for a new Alzheimer’s disease therapy have been dashed by news that Pfizer and Medivation’s Dimebon (latrepirdine) performed no better than placebo in its latest Phase III clinical trial. The drug had shown promise in Phase II trials last year and was causing something of a stir due to its interesting proposed mode of action (as reported in Chemistry World).

Merck snaps up Millipore

After speculation over a possible bid by Thermo Fisher Scientific for Billerica, US-based life sciences support company Millipore, German group Merck KGaA has swooped in to buy out the remainder of Millipore’s shares for $107 a pop. This values the deal at $7.2 billion (£4.8 billion) including assumed debt.

While at first sight it might look a little strange for a chemicals company to acquire Millipore, Merck’s chairman Karl-Ludwig Kley calls the move ‘an excellent strategic fit’ adding that it will allow the company to offer an integrated laboratory supplies service and ‘unlock value in our chemicals business’.

Astellas and OSI slug it out

There’s a brawl brewing in the boardrooms of Japanese drugmaker Astellas and US-based OSI Pharmaceuticals. Astellas is on a mergers and acquisitions drive - after licensing Basilea’s antifungal isavuconazole last week, it set its sights on OSI this week, but the US firm is putting up a fight.

On Monday, Astellas announced an all-cash offer of $52 per share, which was promptly rebuffed by the OSI board, who said that Astellas’s $3.5 billion offer ‘very significantly undervalues the company’, despite it representing a 40 per cent premium over the previous day’s closing stock price. Astellas hit back with a lawsuit against OSI to prevent the US firm from implementing its ‘poison pill’ shareholder rights plan to block a hostile bid, saying that the board was ‘not acting in the shareholders’ best interests’. In the meantime OSI’s share price rose above $56, the board said it is ‘reviewing the offer’ and has advised shareholders to sit tight.

Bausch + Lomb spots an opportunity

Eyecare specialist Bausch + Lomb has licensed French firm NicOx’s glaucoma drug – currently dubbed NCX116. The drug is a nitric oxide-donating prostaglandin analogue, formerly in development with Pfizer as a successor to Xalatan (latanoprost). NicOx has already seen reasonable success with its strategy of bolting NO-donor groups onto existing drugs to complement their existing activity – its nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory naproxcinod is currently in the filing process with the FDA (as reported in Chemistry World).

INDUSTRY

Explosion and TiCl₄ leak at Cristal

An explosion at Cristal Global’s titanium dioxide plant in Stallingborough near Grimbsby, UK, has caused liquid titanium tetrachloride and a cloud of accompanying fumes to leak from the plant. According to Cristal’s official release, seen by the Commercial Chemist, three employees were hospitalised – one has already been discharged but one is receiving specialist treatment.

TiCl₄ is produced as part of the chloride process for extracting TiO₂ from minerals using chlorine gas – liquid TiCl₄ can be distilled and then burned in pure oxygen to give high purity TiO₂.

The emergency services contained the liquid spillage and shipping in the river Humber was halted for several hours to allow the gas to dissipate.

Terra turf war opens a new front

CF Industries has issued a new bid for rival fertiliser producer Terra industries, challenging a bid made by Norwegian firm Yara two weeks ago. CF had originally made an all-stock offer that valued Terra at $2.1 billion in January 2009, in an attempt to avoid being bought out itself by US fertiliser firm Agrium. However, Terra refused the offer and CF withdrew in January 2010.

‘We withdrew our prior offer because we believed that Terra was unwilling to agree to a sale,’ said Stephen Wilson, CF’s chief executive. ‘Now that Terra is for sale, we have made an offer that is superior to Yara’s substantially lower, highly conditional offer.’

The new offer is for $4.05 billion in cash – which CF already has in place – topped up with CF stocks. However, it does rely on Terra pulling out of its deal with Yara, which will cost them $123 million in break-up fees. Terra has acknowledged the offer but is yet to make any kind of decision

Linde brings helium to Oz

Linde Gases – part of German conglomerate Linde Group - has opened the first helium production facility in the southern hemisphere. The plant in Darwin, Australia, will produce 150 million cubic feet of the gas each year to supply markets in Australia, New Zealand and the growing demand from Asia. The extra production capacity should also bring extra stability to a traditionally quite volatile market, which has seen several drastic shortages in recent years, as reported in Chemistry World.

Steve Penn, global head of merchant and packaged gases at Linde, said ‘With global demand for helium expected to increase, the plant is undoubtedly good news not only for the Asia Pacific region but for the entire world.’

Phillip Broadwith

Yesterday afternoon a group of respected editors from various publications around the world met to discuss what they felt were the most significant product launches at Pittcon this year and vote on who should win the bronze, silver and gold Pittcon Editors’ Awards.

Each editor is asked to nominate three products and after the list of nominations is compiled the products are described. The award winners were announced this morning and a troupe of editors filed round the exhibition floor to award the plaques and congratulate the winners.

My enthusiasm for the technology inside Affinity Biosystems’ Archimedes instrument that I stumbled upon yesterday must have been infectious as it won the gold award with a clear majority - to the delight of Ken Babcock (right), the company’s chief executive. It works by measuring the mass of particles entering a microfluidic channel contained within a MEMS resonator, which means the particle size can also be determined. The technique can analyse a broader range of samples than competing optical methods.

The silver award went to the SPECTRO MS from Ametek, the first ICP-MS that scans nearly the entire periodic table simultaneously.

In third place was the infiTOF mass spectrometer from start-up company MSI Tokyo. The instrument is based on orbi-electrode technology that dramatically shrinks the size of a high resolution TOF MS instrument from around nine feet tall to the size of a desktop PC!

Further nominations went to: Acquity UPLC H Class, Waters; Mobius Mobility Instrument, Wyatt Technology; ICS 500 CapIC, Dionex; RheolaserLAB, Formulaction; NanoIR, Anasys; LabNavigator, Forston Laboratories; Shuttle & Find, Carl Zeiss; Discovery-SPD, CEM; NexION 300, PerkinElmer; FasTOF, Zoex; Nanotrap Biomarker Discovery Platform, Shimadzu; LTQ Velos, Thermo Fisher Scientific; Prismatic Multi Species Gas Analyser, Tiger Optics; Mass Stream D-6300, Bronkhurst; First Defender RM, Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Matt Wilkinson

Well yesterday the barrage of press conferences eased up a little and I found time to walk the floor of the show and start talking to people.

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The economic recovery is on - at least that appears to be the general tone of the press conferences at Pittcon so far The analytical industry is often considered a bellwether that tracks how the pharmaceutical and chemical industries are doing - and the industry seems to think things are going well.

Last year the press conferences were often a sombre affair, but this year the tone has returned to one of optimism and excitement - not least for those companies releasing exciting new products. (more…)

In this week’s Chemistry in it element podcast, Simon Cotton, from Uppingham School in the UK, introduces roentgenium: an element suspected to be a very precious metal………..albeit only for a few seconds

Why not take some time out of your day to listen to Bibi, Phillip and I taking about chip-based male fertility tests, knotting molecules and cancer risk from third hand smoke.

Also included is an interview by Mark Korsmit from paint company AkzoNobel – who designed the paint for McLaren Mercedes 2010 Formula 1 car.

PLUS - enter our * new* chemistry joke competition - listen to this month’s joke and if you think you can do better send your entries to chemistryworld@rsc.org for a chance to win one of our fabulous Chemistry World goodie bags!