Symyx links with ICI
26 Jul 2000
Symyx Technologies and Imperial Chemical Industries have today entered into a research, development and licensing agreement directed to high value specialty materials for a broad range of industrial applications.
Under the terms of the agreement, ICI will fund Symyx's discovery efforts and will have exclusive rights to commercialise materials discovered within the fields of the collaboration. In addition, the agreement provides for ICI to make royalty payments to Symyx in connection with its sale of products incorporating these materials.
'Symyx has demonstrated success in discovering a number of promising new materials, and we are pleased to establish this collaboration to apply their discovery capabilities to our areas of interest,' said Carmine Iovine, Group Vice President of R&D for ICI.
'The addition of this collaboration with ICI complements our current programs in synthetic polymers and life sciences, by enabling us to discover polymers and other materials to address large, industrial markets,' stated Steve Goldby, chairman and chief executive officer of Symyx.
Yesterday, Symyx Technologies announced that The Dow Chemical Company received and accepted the first Symyx Discovery Tools polyolefins system. This system performs up to 100 experiments a day, designed primarily to discover polyolefin catalysts and other materials. These polyolefin catalysts could be used to reduce manufacturing costs of current plastic products as well as to create new, higher value plastics.
Symyx receives payment for the instruments as well as fees for intellectual property and software licenses over the next three years. Symyx recognised a portion of this revenue at the time the system was accepted by Dow. Dow's purchase of the system is in addition to the ongoing research collaboration between Symyx and Dow established in January 1999.
Symyx partners and customers include some of the leading life science and chemical companies in the world, including Agfa, Aventis, BASF, Bayer, Celanese, Dow, Applied Biosciences and Unilever.
More information at www.symyx.com.
