Company Announcements

In June, CovaIX and Bruker Daltonics announced a strategic collaboration. They jointly support the CovalX High Mass Detection System for all autoflex and ultraflex series instruments and provide new and existing Bruker MALDI customers with access to CovalX applications for protein identification and macromolecular analysis.

Waters named the Flavor Research and Education Center within the Food Science and Nutrition Department at the University of Minnesota a member of its Centers of Innovation Program.

Under a $2.1 million technology agreement with Thermo Fisher Scientific, Proteome Sciences will develop advanced methods to profile changes in key cancer pathways using Thermo’s Orbitrap MS. Thermo gained access to Proteome’s patents covering a three-stage MS fragmentation method. Proteome will also continue to develop Tandem Mass Tags for Thermo.

In June, Perfinity Biosciences signed a comarketing agreement with Thermo Fisher Scientific for its automated protein sample preparation and analysis system.

In June, Thermo Fisher Scientific and the Newman-Lakka Institute for Personalized Cancer Care at Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center announced a R&D collaboration for new methods to detect and track circulating biomarkers in blood.

Bruker announced in June a collaboration for distribution of ImaBiotech’s Quantinetix software, which quantifies and normalizes molecules for MALDI.

Product Introductions

Shimadzu launched the iMScope, which combines an optical microscope, hybrid ion trap TOF MS and atmospheric MALDI to enable optically observed samples to be analyzed by MS using only one instrument.

Shimadzu introduced the LC/MS/MS Method Package for Lipid Mediators for the simultaneous analysis of 130 lipid mediators and related compounds.

Shimadzu launched the Method Packaging for Primary Metabolites, which permits simultaneous analysis of 55 primary metabolites in a single 20 minute injection.

In June, Thermo Fisher Scientific introduced 10 new or updated Thermo Scientific MS software: FreeStyle 1.0 data visualization software, which facilities rapid method development; Lipid Search, which automates the comprehensive analysis of lipids from raw mass spectra generated by a variety of instruments; ProSight 3.0, featuring new algorithms to enhance intact-protein analysis; and the mzCloud mass spectral database to help identify unknowns, even when the spectra is not present in libraries.

Agilent released the MassHunter All Ion MS/MS software for creating acquisition methods using Agilent TOF and quadrupole TOF MS, and MassHunter BioConfirm, which provides mirror plots for comparing biosimilars and peak modeling deconvolution to determine the molecular weight of intact proteins.