Company Announcements

Agilent Technologies and South Korea–based Samsung Medical Center entered into a collaboration agreement in July. The Department of Laboratory Medicine & Genetics Research will use the 6530 Q-TOF LC/MS and 6430 Triple Quadrupole LC/MS systems to analyze clinical samples and develop novel clinical assays.

In August, Thermo Fisher Scientific entered into a Technology Alliance Partnership with scientists at Princeton University to accelerate research in triple quadrupole and accurate mass LC/MS for life science applications. The Partnership will focus on metabolomics, proteomics integrated with molecular biology and infectious diseases, and MS/proteomics method development.

Isoprime, an Elementar Group company, was named in August a channel partner of Agilent Technologies for providing GC–isotope ratio MS (IRMS) and LC-IRMS.

Microsaic entered into an OEM agreement in May to provide its MiD chip-based MS system for integration with Biotage’s Isolera flash purification system. The product will be launched in early 2013.

AB SCIEX signed an OEM distribution agreement in September with Sigma-Aldrich for its SCIEX iChemistry Solutions, which consist of the iTRAQ reagents for proteomics and IDQuant standards for pesticide analysis. The companies will also collaborate on development.

Product Introductions

FLIR introduced the Griffin 824 desktop MS system for trace detection of explosives and narcotics.

In August, Owlstone launched the Lonestar Portable Crude Oil Analyzer, based on field asymmetric ion mobility spectrometry, for at-line detection and quantification of crude oil contaminants.

Extrel released the VerSpec MB (molecular beam) inlet quadruople MS systems, consisting of the MB2, MB3 and MBx systems. The MB2 and MB3 are designed for the analysis of neutrals or ions across a wide pressure range. The MBx is designed for “extreme” samples.

BioMérieux introduced a specialized version of the VITEK MS solution for the identification of bacteria and yeast in industrial pharmaceutical applications.

Thermo Fisher Scientific launched in September a new data independent acquisition proteomics capability for the Thermo Scientific Q Exactive quadrupole Orbitrap LC-MS/MS that allows the system to collect MS/MS spectra on virtually all ions in a sample by selecting broad m/z windows and fragmenting all precursors in that window. This enables the quantification of nearly all detected peptides in the sample in a single run. The instrument control software is available as a developer’s kit.

Sales/Orders of Note

In July, Isoprime shipped its 500th IRMS system to the National Physical Laboratory in New Delhi, India.