At Pittcon, IBO took the opportunity to talk to executives at four of the analytical-instrument and laboratory-product industry’s largest companies, PerkinElmer, Shimadzu Scientific Instruments (SSI) (the US-based division of Japan’s Shimadzu), Thermo Fisher Scientific and Waters, to discuss challenges and opportunities for both their businesses and the instrument industry in general.

Asked about challenges this year for the industry, Chris Gaylor, senior vice president of Sales at SSI, noted economic headwinds. Tom Loewald, senior vice president and president of Analytical Instruments (AI) at Thermo, discussed the recent challenges created by the US-government budget cycle, including sequestration, stating that stability in the funding environment is very important to the company. Both executives noted a strong US economic environment, as did Jon DiVincenzo, president of PerkinElmer Environmental Health.

For SSI, US R&D has also become an emphasis, with the opening last year of an R&D hub in Maryland (see IBO 4/15/14). “This center provides us with a focus on meeting customer needs by using current off-the-shelf technologies together with our software, applications and third-party instrumentation. By doing this we are creating much tighter bonds with customers,” stated Mr. Gaylor. For PerkinElmer, a highlight of 2014 was its collaborations with academia, according to Mr. DiVincenzo. “I think specifically what we’ve invested in, in the last year are scientific collaborations where we are funding university work,” he told IBO, citing PerkinElmer’s partnership with the University of Rochester for optics.

The challenges in China last year remain a concern. Describing the slower sales cycle, Mr. Loewald told IBO, ”It wasn’t that the investment had changed necessarily, but the decision process and the procurement process had lengthened.” Both he and Mr. DiVincenzo stated that the situation has improved. But, as Mr. Loewald added, “It’s a little early to say this year whether that is completely passed through.”

Opportunities for 2015 and the medium term are widespread, according to the executives, and include opportunities created by greater instrument accessibility. “I think one of the other trends you can see coming in the next maybe three-to-five years is many of the sophisticated technologies are very open; you can run many different applications,” explained Mr. DiVincenzo. “But the downside of that is if you are not really a specialist in that technology, you have a steep learning curve. So I think what we will have to do is look at those applications and have a fit-for-purpose analyzer.”

To increase accessibility, instrumentation must be simpler to use and more integrated, according to Rohit Khanna, PhD, vice president of Worldwide Marketing for the Waters Division of Waters. “The real change that is occurring in this industry (and what we’ve started talking about more at these sessions in the morning [at Pittcon]) is the opportunity to bring the technology into market segments and application areas where it traditionally hasn’t been.” Waters’s QDa mass detector (see IBO 3/15/14) and ionKey separation system (see IBO 3/15/14) are examples of the progress in this area.

Dr. Khanna described food and clinical as two markets in particular that can benefit from the development of easier-to-use instrumentation. For Waters, the clinical market is an important opportunity, especially for the transition of biomarkers from research to the clinic. For food testing, he discussed the limitations of current food testing. “Every food company tells me if they could put a simple device to test in manufacturing on a regular basis, they’d love that. But they can’t do that today. So they can take 1 out of 100,000 samples and send it to a lab.”

Mr. Gaylor also noted clinical opportunities for MS. He said that opportunities this year include “the ability to create markets for some of our new technologies, such as the Noviplex card/blood-spot technology [see IBO 3/15/14] and create diagnostic platforms for real-life challenges.” He named “[t]he emergence of new technologies in MS, including diagnostics and hyphenated-MS products” as an opportunity for the industry over the next three to five years.

The pharmaceutical industry also remains a key market, which is reflected in recent business developments. Regarding the integration of Life Technologies and Thermo (see IBO 4/15/13), Tom Keppeler, Public Relations leader at Thermo, told IBO, “Regardless of where a drug is in the discovery-to-production time frame, we have a gigantic play there.” Commenting on how Thermo’s Life Sciences Solutions and AI divisions work together, Mr. Loewald said, “So we really look at it from a customer-driven standpoint. Customers are coming in saying ‘alright, we are working with both parts of the company. This data now needs to start overlapping. Help us do that.’” He described how Life Sciences Solutions’ expertise in genomics and AI’s proteomics knowledge are being combined. “So the [scientists’] demand is, ‘we did our genomics research; we did our proteomics research; now we want to bring the two together and find correlations.’ I’d say the hunger for that kind of advancement in research is tremendous.”

As Dr. Khanna explained, the pharmaceutical industry’s demand is consistent despite short-term disruptions. “You find that the pharmaceutical industry has no choice but to buy analytical technology. They need it for every aspect of their work. So if they go a few years where they are not making enough money, what they’ll do is stretch the timing of the systems in the lab but eventually, especially when they are trying to get new samples out, they have no choice.”

Asked about informatics, the executives acknowledged the progress made in lab software systems. Commenting on the highlights, Mr. Gaylor said, “One is the use of cloud technology for handling the vast amounts of data generated in large laboratories and by newer high-end, high-volume instruments. Another is Shimadzu’s multi-instrument approach to software control of our instrumentation with other commercial software platforms.” For Dr. Khanna, the progress includes the creation of the chromatography data systems market and Waters’ lab-centric approach to LIMS.

And the opportunities for lab informatics, and for the use of lab information both in and outside the lab, are numerous. Mr. Loewald explained that customers routinely tell him that informatics is a bottleneck. Mr. DiVincenzo said, “I think the trends in the next three to five years, it’s very much like we see in the consumer markets—everything is going to be gaining lots more data, so [a need will be] storing that data so it can be analyzed anywhere.” As Mr. Keppeler put it, “Everybody really wants to see a simplification of how you merge data. The more sophisticated that we make instruments, the more worldwide that we make companies, the more crucial the data is.”