Analytical instruments big winners at R&D awards

Analytical instruments accounted for 12 of the winners in this year’s R&D 100 awards. Run by R&D Magazine, the awards recognize the 100 most technologically significant products introduced onto the market over the past year.

Five of the analytical winners came from Thermo Fisher Scientific.

• EASY-Spray, which combines a liquid chromatography column, heater, high voltage electrode and emitter into a single system for protein analysis.
• Dionex ICS-4000, which is the first high-pressure ion chromatography system that combines three different detectors – electrochemical, charge and conductivity.
• TruNarc analyzer, a handheld Raman analyzer for identifying suspected narcotics.
• Nicolet iS50 spectrometer, which is the first research-grade Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy instrument with one-touch automation.
• iCAP Q, a novel inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICP-MS)

Agilent Technologies also received an award for its novel ICP-MS instrument, the 8800 Triple Quadrupole ICP-MS. According to Agilent, this ICP-MS is the first to have a tandem MS configuration, allowing it to solve challenging analytical problems in fields such as semiconductors, environment and food that have proven difficult for conventional ICP-MS instruments.

Other analytical winners included EMD Millipore with its Direct Detect Spectrometer for measuring amide bonds in protein chains. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory won eight awards, including one for its high-throughput nanostructure-initiator mass spectrometer, which can determine the molecular composition of thousands of samples much faster than conventional methods.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory won for its Combined Orthogonal Mobility & Mass Evaluation Technology (CoMet), which combines ion mobility spectrometry with quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry for detecting disease biomarkers. The remaining analytical winners were: NevadaNano for its Molecular Property Spectrometer; P&P Optica for PPO SWIR, a short wave infrared spectrometer; and Princeton Instruments for its IsoPlane imaging spectrograph.