To further promote joint research and development projects with leading academic and research institutions in the United States, Shimadzu Corporation has established the SSI Innovation Center at Shimadzu Scientific Instruments, Inc. (SSI), its wholly-owned U.S. subsidiary based in Colombia, Maryland.

In North America, Shimadzu Corporation has been participating in joint research projects in such areas as clinical medicine, food safety, and the environment involving the use of Shimadzu’s main products, such as chromatographs and mass spectrometers. To foster more joint research and collaborative projects with customers, SSI was reorganized to establish the SSI Innovation Center for the purpose of providing feedback to product development operations as quickly as possible.

The SSI Innovation Center comprises three groups with a current total of 26 employees. These groups include the Strategic Collaboration Development Group, Research and Development Group, and Application Development Group. Operations are scheduled to officially start in late July 2015, with a planned R&D investment of 20 million dollars over the next five years.

In the United States, the state of Maryland is home to Johns Hopkins University, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Cancer Institute (NCI), and many other leading academic and research institutions and companies. It is a particularly ideal environment for developing deeper partnerships in the field of clinical medicine.

The general manager of the Analytical & Measuring Instruments Division, Shuzo Maruyama, commented about the center as follows. “Due to the concentration of clinical medicine and healthcare research institutions like the NIH in North America, and particularly in the Northeast United States, it is an ideal location for developing applications for our analytical and measuring instruments in those fields. To take maximum advantage of Shimadzu’s strengths and advantages in markets around the world, we plan to establish similar facilities based on a global innovation center concept in other regions as well. The SSI Innovation Center in the United States represents the first such facility based on this concept. We also plan to establish a mass spectrometry (MS) center in Beijing, China, by the end of 2015. We expect these facilities will serve as a driver of new product development for the Analytical & Measuring Instruments Division.”