Company Announcements

In September, the FDA, University of Maryland, their Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (JIFSAN) and Waters opened the International Food Safety Training Laboratory to provide hands-on lab training on detection methods and classroom methods on regulatory standards. Operated by the JIFSAN, the lab will be able to teach 200 professionals per year. Waters provided a multi-year commitment to fund the lab’s construction, provided systems and assisted in designing training programs.

Waters announced in October that the University of Minnesota’s Mass Spectrometry Laboratory under the direction of Joseph Dalluge, PhD, joined its Centers of Innovation Program for his research into diagnostic marker assay development relevant to cystic fibrosis and other diseases. He is also a collaborating member of the University’s new Center for Bioanalysis of Molecular Signaling.

In October, Waters welcomed Dr. Ganesh Anand’s laboratory at the National University of Singapore into its Centers of Innovation Program for its research into protein-protein, protein-ligand and protein–nucleic acid interactions. Dr. Anand is an expert in the field of amide H/D exchange MS.

In October, Protea Biosciences named Alessandro Baldi, PhD, vice president and general manager. He was previously senior director of PerkinElmer’s MS business.

Shimadzu announced a joint research agreement in October with Shimane University for neonatal screening using tandem MS. A Shimadzu LC-MS8030 LC/MS will be used by Professor Seiji Yamaguchi to screen 30,000 samples with the goal of developing new analysis methods and software to reduce operator workload and expand applications to other dysmetabolic syndromes.

Agilent announced in October the winners of its 2011 eMerging Insights grant program for research on open source data-integration tools. Dr. Michael J. MacCoss of the University of Washington will receive $75,000 for expanding the capabilities of the Skyline Targeted Proteomics Environment (which is used to build selected reaction–monitoring/multiple reaction–monitoring methods and analyzing data) to allow integration with GeneSpring software. Dr. Peter J. Park of Harvard University received $75,000 to extend his work on a method, based on bioclustering, to identify genes whose expression is driven by copy number variations. He will develop the tool into a browser-based application and extend it to compare tumors at different grades.

In December, Bruker announced a collaboration with the Graduate School of Analytical Science and Technology at Chungnam National University to advance glycomics and its applications in the biopharmaceutical industry in the Republic of Korea. Bruker and the University will jointly develop MALDI-TOF-based methodologies targeting the analysis of glycans, focusing on the quality control of biosimilars. In partnership with Bruker’s Korean industrial partners and the Korea Basic Science Institute, the partnership will act as an Asia Glycomics Reference Site.