SGE Analytical Services signed a joint R&D agreement with the Australian Proteome Facility for applications of its ProteCol LC platform and microfabrication technologies for protein biomarker discovery.

Waters entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with the EPA’s National Exposure Research Laboratory to develop trace level analytical methods for detecting perfluorinated compounds in soil and water.

Waters and Northwestern University opened the Waters Mass Spectrometry Laboratory within the Barnett Institute of Chemical and Biological Analysis for studying protein shapes and characteristics. The Laboratory is equipped with four Waters MS systems.

In May, Waters agreed to supply instrumentation for the China State Environmental Protection Agency’s Dioxin Laboratories and Monitoring Network.

Waters and Rosetta Biosoftware are developing interfaces to promote compatibility between Rosetta’s Elucidator system and Waters’s Q-TOF Premier and Synapt HDMS systems.

Waters is collaborating with Dotmatics to develop an integrated structure elucidation software tool to complement its TOF, Synapt and MALDI Synapt HDMS systems.

Syft Technologies opened an office in Cheshire, UK.

In April, Proteome Systems sold the rights to its Chemical Inkjet Printer and Xcise automated gel processing platform to Shimadzu in exchange for cash and the provision of Shimadzu MS and protein separation technologies.

Thermo Fisher Scientific expanded its Biomarker Research Initiative in Mass Spectrometry center (see IBO 3/15/05), a collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital, to include clinical validation and clinical application assays.

Stratos Biosystems exclusively licensed from the National Institute of Standards and Technology the rights to a UV-photo patterning technique for the manufacture of MS biochips.

JEOL and Correlogic Systems signed an R&D agreement covering clinical applications of MS. The companies have worked together informally for more than a year.

Hitachi High-Technologies signed a joint research agreement with Japan’s National Cancer Center to develop a commercially viable method of blood diagnosis based on proteome analysis, including the development of blood specimen preprocessing technologies and the development of a general purpose MS system for clinical testing.

Under a cross-licensing agreement covering APPI (Atmospheric Pressure Photo-Ionization), Syagen Technology will supply the PhotoMate APPI source to the majority of LC/MS manufacturers and Applied Biosystems/MDS Sciex will the supply the Photospray APPI source to its LC/MS customers.