For the first time in its 63-year history, the Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, marking a welcome return to the Northeast US, which many vendors hoped would boost attendance. The conference took place March 17–30. It appears the new location did help. Organizers told IBO that preliminary total attendance was 18,197, a 15.5% increase over last year’s event in Orlando, Florida (see IBO 3/31/12). The increase is also noteworthy in the current economic environment. The last time attendance topped 18,000 was 2009 in Chicago, Illinois, which is also where next year’s Pittcon will be held on March 2–6.

The number of exhibitors was also up, rising 6.6% to 1,011. Exhibitors with whom IBO spoke reported mixed traffic on the floor, but all were enthusiastic about the move to Philadelphia. Notable on the exhibit floor was the number of Chinese companies. Shimadzu and Waters endorsed their commitments to the show at their press conferences. Despite the loss of Agilent and PerkinElmer as exhibitors, other major vendors have remained.

As usual, Pittcon was packed with press conferences, though seemingly fewer new products were introduced, as many of the larger companies no longer wait to debut products at the show. However, Beckman Coulter, Bio-Rad Laboratories, Bruker and Waters were among the larger vendors that did launch significant new platforms at the show.

Also evident was the role of collaborations in new product development. APIX Technologies, Waters and Xylem each noted the role of customer collaborations in the development of new products that debuted at the show. Other types of collaborations were new marketing partnerships. Advion and CAMAG announced an exclusive OEM and distribution partnership for a thin layer chromatography (TLC)/MS interface. The combined system, which pairs Advion’s Compact MS with CAMAG’s TLC products, enables direct mass analysis from TLC plates for synthetic organic chemistry and peptide synthesis applications. Advion will exclusively market and support the system in certain geographic markets, such as North America and parts of Europe.

AB SCIEX also announced new partnerships. The company is teaming up with LECO to offer more complete metabolomics solutions (see page 2). In addition, it has entered into a collaboration agreement with the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) for quantitative proteomics. At AB SCIEX’s press conference, ISB’s Leroy Hood, MD, PhD, and Robert Moritz, PhD, spoke about the scientific challenges the technology partnership addresses. Using AB SCIEX’s data-independent SWATH Acquisition technology, Triple TOF 5600 and ekspert nano-LC 400 System, ISB is developing validated peptide spectra libraries, enabling targeted quantification of nearly all peptides and proteins in a complex sample in a single analysis. Finally, AB SCIEX, in partnership with Phenomenex, announced a collaboration with Eurofins for method development for the analysis of antibiotic and fungicide residues in animal feed.

The exhibit mirrored many of the instrument industry’s themes in recent years, including the introduction of solutions providing higher productivity and those that help to reduce laboratory costs. The increasing number of smaller size and more integrated solutions were also notable. Informatics also continues to be a prominent area of product development.