MOBILion Systems set out in 2015 to disrupt the LC-MS market. The company’s Structures for Lossless Ion Manipulation (SLIM)technology utilizes a printed circuit board and electrical fields to move ions along what the company describes as a “serpentine path,” replacing the shorter straight ion flight path found in other high-resolution IMS systems. Because the ions must travel a longer path, SLIM can deliver better separation and sorting of ionized molecules and thus higher resolution. The resolving power of SLIM of >250 compares to 40–60 for other IMS systems. The higher resolving power also improves Collision Cross Section (CCS) measurements for more accurate estimates of ion size and shape. At the same time, SLIM maintains sensitivity due to lossless ion manipulation and higher ion accumulation, and results in faster measurement times and greater reproducibility than competing IMS technologies, according to the company.

MOBILion announced its first product, the high-resolution ion mobility (HRIM) MOBIE, in 2021 and struck a partnership with Agilent Technologies to integrate the standalone MOBIE device with Agilent’s Q-TOF MS systems. Agilent also took part in the company’s $60 million Series C round the same year.

“PAMAF was the advancement made to improve upon that MS2 acquisition rate and deliver better performance that translates into more protein IDs.”

MOBILion is now addressing the high-resolution proteomics market, developing BILLIE, which combines SLIM with Parallel Accumulation Mobility Aligned Fragmentation (PAMAF) for LC-MS/MS. With SLIM providing better isolation and separation of precursor ions in MS1, fragmentation in MS2 is improved. This eliminates the loss of ions typical of other high-resolution proteomics MS techniques, according to the company. “Ion efficiency of the MS2 fragmentation step is critical to performance,” explained MOBILion CEO Melissa Sherman, PhD. “PAMAF was the advancement made to improve upon that MS2 acquisition rate and deliver better performance that translates into more protein IDs.” This addresses many of the challenges of MS proteomics, including finding low-abundance proteins in complex mixtures.

As a result, BILLIE will be a competitive answer to today’s highest-resolution proteomic MS systems, according to Dr. Sherman. “BILLIE is being specifically designed to achieve better performance than the market leading proteomics instruments, which today are the Orbitrap Astral platform from Thermo Fisher Scientific and the timsTOF platform from Bruker.” She explained that those systems have MS2 acquisition rates of about 150–300 Hz. “With our system utilizing the same core SLIM technology [as MOBIE], just in a different configuration and operation mode, we’ve demonstrated >1000 Hz MS2 acquisition rates.”

“We’re talking to multiple Q-TOF vendors about incorporating our technology with their latest and greatest”

Commercialization of BILLIE will be done in partnership with an MS company that will fully integrate BILLIE into its MS system. “We’re focusing on top vendors. We’re talking to multiple Q-TOF vendors about incorporating our technology with their latest and greatest,” commented Dr. Sherman.

MOBILion is also pursuing a similar path for MOBIE of full integration within the MS instrument. MOBIE is currently being used in the pharma and food segments, among others. Applications include food testing, drug characterization, and PFAS analysis.

In the future, SLIM could also be integrated with triple quadrupole MS systems. “We’re also talking to various vendors about licensing and potentially co-developing these products for a variety of applications. That extends into even clinical mass spectrometry. So by taking mass spec where it couldn’t go before, we’re addressing the pain points of LC with our technology,” explained Dr. Sherman. She added, “We’ve got some product concepts on the low-resolution side also that are emerging that we’re talking to folks about.”

The integration of SLIM within an MS instrument was informed by the experience with the initial stand-alone configuration of MOBIE. “The user needs to be able to use the system more seamlessly and more easily than what a bolt-on field-upgradable system can do,” commented Dr. Sherman. “What customers really liked about MOBIE was the more automated push-button method development compared to liquid chromatography, but what they would love to see is the full integration of SLIM with the QTOF.”

“On the front end, because of the way our system works, we can automate to a large part of method development.”

BILLIE will also address one of the largest bottlenecks in high-resolution proteomics MS, data processing and analysis, according to Dr. Sherman. “It’s cleaner spectra has less noise and sharper peaks. What that means is because it’s cleaner, it’s higher quality and higher quantity. Because it’s such high-quality data, we can develop better and more accurate complementary AI data processing tools and data analysis tools.” This high quality also helps method development, which can be another time consuming step in using MS. “On the front end, because of the way our system works, we can automate to a large part of method development. And we can have our users download pre-populated methods. You hit the go button and your method is already done.”

Once again this year, MOBILion will have a presence at ASMS 2026. “We’ve got about 27 presentations. Most are posters. Six breakfast seminars and an oral presentation. About 75% of those are given by external folks, so it’s a combination of MOBIE customers, and then we have a Proteomics Advisory Board and some of our collaborators that we’ve been working with on our BILLIE prototype.” The company will host a hospitality suite in the evening.

MOBILion is also developing SLIM for the low-resolution or nominal-mass MS market. “The performance drivers in that market are speed, throughput and sensitivity…Our platform technology is delivering sensitivity without impacting robustness. We’ve heard resoundingly from customers that they want more sensitivity without impacting robustness.”  Whether SLIM is integrated with high-resolution or low-resolution mass analyzers, Dr. Sherman believes the common them for MOBILion is “creating a new good standard in all LC-MS workflows.”

Consequently, Dr. Sherman foresees many possibilities for future product development due to the nature of the SLIM technology itself. “It’s literally a printed circuit board that can make ions do different things, go different places–all controlled by electronics. Do you want to optimize for dynamic range? Do you want to optimize for sensitivity? Do you want to optimize by increasing the signal and removing baseline noise to impact sensitivity?” asked Dr. Sherman. “It all depends on the type of detector you’re integrating with and the workflow you’re trying to optimize, and suffice to say, we have a configuration for that. So it’s really exciting because the opportunities are pretty much endless in terms of what we can do.” This is an answer to several shortcomings of current MS systems, according to Dr. Sherman. “We really do think this is a platform technology that represents the next two to three decades of LC-mass spec development because it’s that powerful and that diverse.”