UPM, a global leader in sustainable material solutions, has achieved an important milestone in the startup of production of commercial, wood-based chemicals in its Leuna biorefinery in Germany. The refinery, which is the largest industrial-scale investment in biochemicals in Europe, has started the production and commercialization of industrial sugars. After successfully starting up the hydrothermal breakdown of wood on industrial scale earlier this year, the biorefinery has now reached stable operation in separating lignin and sugars. This critical process step is a prerequisite for the conversion of sugars to renewable glycols and lignin to renewable functional fillers. “Leuna is significant proof of UPM’s commitment to scaling up innovative, high-performance bio-based material solutions.

Through this combination, Amcor enhances its position as a global leader in consumer and healthcare packaging solutions with the unique material science and innovation capabilities required to revolutionize product development and meet customers’ and consumers’ sustainability aspirations. With multiple new growth opportunities and $650 million of identified synergies, Amcor is well placed to deliver significant near- and long-term value for customers and shareholders. Amcor CEO Peter Konieczny commented, “This combination delivers on our strategy to become a stronger company with a broader, more complete offering for customers and enhanced positions in attractive categories. Our focus now turns to delivering on synergies and growth opportunities, including leveraging our extensive global footprint and enhanced innovation and R&D capabilities, while also further refining our portfolio. The outstanding work our teams have completed over the past several months enables Amcor to enter fiscal 2026 in a better position than we anticipated, with a synergy run rate that will start strong and build quickly through the year. We are now uniquely positioned to deliver more consistent growth, further improve margins and drive compelling near- and long-term value for shareholders.”

Wiley announces a new collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to launch a generative AI agent for scientific literature search on AWS. The first of its kind from a publisher on AWS, the AI agent will be unveiled at the 7th annual AWS Life Sciences Symposium in New York City on May 6. The AI agent will demonstrate how researchers can conduct comprehensive full-text scientific literature search across Wiley’s extensive journal content, moving beyond traditional abstract-only searches to access detailed content within main sections like methods and results. The new Wiley literature search agent is available as part of an open source toolkit for healthcare and life sciences agents that has been assembled by AWS. The toolkit offers a catalog of starter agents and an orchestration framework for organizations to build and customize their agentic systems, supporting use cases from biomarker discovery to clinical trial protocol generation. The new AI agent currently includes AI searchable access to articles under the creative commons license, such as Cancer Medicine,delivering reliable and cited insights in minutes rather than the current hours- to days-long manual process of discovering and perusing dozens of articles for relevant information. “Our collaboration with AWS demonstrates how researchers can access and leverage scientific literature to power more effective discovery across the life sciences sector,” said Josh Jarrett, SVP and GM of AI Growth for Wiley.