Solstice Medical announced Thursday it has moved from Fort Wayne to share space at a state-of-the-art building in Whitley County and needs to fill 10 to 15 positions.

The company recently left the Northeast Indiana Innovation Center – an incubator for technology businesses – to pair with Iotron Industries, which has a $15.3 million complex at Park 30 Business Center in Columbia City. The building spans 54,000 square feet.

Solstice CEO Dan Sands said he has started to hire engineers, salespeople, marketing and related workers for his enterprise that provides inventory management and workflow automation solutions for medical device manufacturers and hospitals.

The jobs will range from $60,000 to $90,000 a year.

Iotron is a provider of contract sterilization services to the medical industry, pest and microbial reduction for agribusiness, and materials modification in the production of orthopedic products.

Whitley County Economic Development Corp. President Alan Tio said Solstice may receive up to $50,000 in incentives if the company follows through with its job creation.

Lilly profit outlook far below forecast

Financial analysts expected Eli Lilly’s 2012 earnings to slip after the drugmaker lost patent protection for a key product, but they didn’t envision a decline as steep as what Lilly forecast Thursday.

The Indianapolis company said it will earn between $3.10 and $3.20 a share in its first full year after losing the U.S. patent that protects its antipsychotic Zyprexa from generic competition. Analysts expect, on average, earnings of $3.60 a share.

Zyprexa rang up more than $5 billion in 2010 sales. Lilly’s top-selling drug also brought in $3.87 billion through the first nine months of 2011 before the patent expired in October.

Fiat raises stake in Chrysler Group

Fiat said Thursday it has expanded its controlling stake in Chrysler Group, meeting the final target set by the U.S. government in the deal that rescued the U.S. carmaker from bankruptcy and taking a step toward a planned merger.

Fiat’s holding increased to 58.5 percent from 53.5 percent after the carmakers committed to produce a fuel-saving model in the U.S., the companies said. Fiat ended up paying about $2 billion for the holding in the third-largest U.S. automaker.

Alcoa to shut down Tennessee smelter

Alcoa Inc. plans to close an aluminum smelter in Tennessee and some operations at a Texas plant to cut costs in the face of weak prices.

The moves will reduce Alcoa’s global smelting capacity by about 12 percent.

The company, which has a plant in Auburn, said Thursday that it will permanently close the smelter in Alcoa, Tenn., which was curtailed in 2009, and shut down two of six idle lines at a smelter in Rockdale, Texas. It expects to complete the shutdowns in the first half of this year and announce other reductions soon.