Company Announcements

In November 2010, the Drug Control Center within the Department of Forensic Science and Drug Monitoring at King’s College London joined Waters’s Centers of Innovation Program. The Center will be responsible for all drug testing of athletes at the 2012 Olympic Games.

Waters plans to build a new MS headquarters near Manchester, UK. It will unite the existing MS operations in four separate UK sites and is expected to open in 2013.

AB SCIEX announced in December 2010 a collaboration with Landeswasserversorgung Water Supply to improve the identification of contaminants in drinking water. The AB SCIEX TripleTOF 5600 System will be used to develop new test methods to expand the range of contaminants that can be screened in repeatable, systematic ways.

AB SCIEX and ARUP Laboratories are collaborating to develop new test methods to improve hormone analysis using the AB SCIEX QTRAP 5500 MS.

AB SCIEX and Geneva Bioinformatics will co-market the respective MS systems and SmileMS software.

AB SCIEX named Rainer Blair president in February. He was previously president for North America & Europe at Videojet.

Product Introductions

Thermo Fisher Scientific introduced the Thermo Scientific AQUAPoP Standards, which are fully synthetic concatenated, heavy-labeled proteotypic peptides for use as precision quantitation and digestion standards in isotopic dilution MS.

PREMIER Biosoft International released SimLipid software for analyzing lipid MS data. The database consists of nine lipid classes and 1,948 lipid species.

Henniker Scientific launched the Cirrus TGA MS, which provides identification of evolved gases and vapors from thermal analysis experiments.

In January, Waters introduced the Waters Xevo G2 TOF MS with QuanTOF and UPLC/MS(E) technology, a method of data acquisition that allows users to view exact mass precursor and fragment ion data from a single data set.

Waters introduced the Biopharmaceutical System Solution, calling it a total system for protein characterization using high-end MS that supports GMP regulations. It consists of the ACQUITY H-Class Bio System, peptide and protein separation technology columns, the Xevo G2 TOF MS and the UNIFI Scientific Information System.

Abbott released the PLEX-ID Biothreat Assay, which is designed to detect and distinguish 17 different biothreat pathogens.

Sales/Orders of Note

In February, AB SCIEX announced the delivery of its 100th AB SCIEX 5500 MS system sold in Germany to the Manfred Donike Institute for Doping Analysis.