Time-of-flight GC/MS (GC-TOF), which includes TOF and Q-TOF GC/MS systems, has long held potential to become a major GC market segment, but has not yet lived up to these expectations. While the technology has performance advantages, other factors have limited growth. However, a new competitor is poised to finally help the GC-TOF market breakout.

Most of the installed GC/MS instruments consist of single quadrupole MS. Ion trap, triple quadrupole and magnetic sector MS account for most of the remaining installed base. The main advantage of GC-TOF over quadrupole and ion trap systems is resolution, with most of the newer GC-TOF instruments offering at least 5,000 FWHM resolution and some systems offering over 50,000 FWHM resolution. GC-TOF is also much faster than magnetic sector and ion trap systems.

GC-TOF is popular in generally the same application areas as other types of GC/MS. It is useful in specific applications with more complex samples that require higher resolution. A small but rapidly growing application area is metabolomics. Several GC-TOF vendors market their systems for metabolomics.

The first GC-TOFs were introduced in the mid-1990s. By 2000, several firms were in the market, including Thermo Fisher Scientific. Many in the scientific community believed that the advantages of GC-TOF and the number of vendors in the market signaled that the technology was on the verge of a major takeoff in demand. However, the market experienced less-than-expected growth.

Despite the performance advantages, end-users may have been hesitant to pay two to three times more for a GC-TOF than a single quadrupole or ion trap GC/MS. The fact that GC-TOF is not a widely established technique and that it requires more methods development for many applications may have also played a limiting role.

With the exception of Thermo, which entered and then exited the GC-TOF market in the early 2000s, none of the five major GC/MS vendors have participated in the GC-TOF market until this year. Recently, Agilent introduced a Q-TOF GC/MS (see IBO 6/15/11) and indicated that it plans to develop a TOF GC/MS in the near future. As the leader in GC/MS, with more than half of the vendor share, Agilent’s entrance into the GC-TOF market is a major validation of the GC-TOF concept. Agilent’s participation may lead to the acceleration in GC-TOF sales that many observers have been expecting.

The total market for GC-TOF instruments in 2010 was about $31 million. While the market has averaged around 10% annual growth for most of the past decade, it has not experienced the short period of much higher growth associated with the widespread acceptance of a new product segment. The market is likely to grow 15% to 20% annually over the next two to three years following Agilent’s product introduction, rising to around $55 million by 2015.

GC-TOF at a Glance:

Leading Suppliers

• Roche/ACEA

• Molecular Devices (Danaher)

• Applied BioPhysics

Largest Markets

• Biopharmaceutical

• Academia

Instrument Cost

• $100,000–$250,000