Pittcon®, the world’s largest annual conference and exposition for laboratory science, is the premier venue for innovations, and the Pittcon Editors’ Awards are all about rewarding those types of advances.
For a product to be considered for this prestigious award, the requirements are that it is being displayed for the first time at a Pittcon exposition and it must be a functioning instrument. Typically, winning products feature innovations in technology or industrial design or may enable new analytical applications.
This year, the dynamic exposition floor offered instruments and services from 935 exhibiting companies representing more than 32 countries. From a display of thousands of products, attending media representatives identified 19 different instruments and submitted their votes to a dedicated core of journalists who then selected winners for Gold, Silver, and Bronze.
Gold Award: DLP® NIRscan™ evaluation module
Figure 1 – Mike J. Walker (right), Business Development Manager, Texas Instruments, accepting the award from Dr. Robert Stevenson, Editor, American Laboratory
.After an intense deliberation, Texas Instruments (Dallas, TX; www.ti.com), a new exhibitor at Pittcon, captured the Gold with its DLP® NIRscan™ evaluation module (EVM), based on the company’s DLP4500NIR polychromator, the principle of which has already been widely used in modern video projection methods (see Figure 1).
“This was our first year at Pittcon, and we immediately realized great value from being a part of the show—top leads and contacts, and excellent insights,” said Mariquita Gordon, Manager of DLP Embedded Products at Texas Instruments. She added, “Winning this year’s Gold Editors’ Award for our DLP NIRscan evaluation module is an honor. To have such recognition from the distinguished industry experts solidifies our belief that DLP technology will enable spectroscopy equipment designers to create truly mobile and accurate NIR spectrometers at notably lower costs.”
The DLP NIRscan evaluation module is a brand new product, and is the first-ever spectroscopy development platform based on award-winning DLP technology. The DLP NIRscan is a complete development platform to design a high-performance, affordable, near-infrared (NIR) spectrometer. Containing everything a designer needs to start developing a DLP-based spectrometer right out of the box, the EVM features the latest DLP chipset, which is the first optimized for use with NIR light.
With DLP technology, spectrometers for use in the food, pharmaceutical, oil/gas, and other emerging industries will be able to deliver lab performance levels in the factory and the field along with potential for significant system cost savings by replacing expensive array detectors with a single-element detector.
Silver Award: ACQUITY® QDa detector
Figure 2 – Explaining the features of the ACQUITY QDa is Elizabeth Hodgdon (right), Senior Product Manager, Waters, to Instrument News’
Stefan Fritsch, Editor, and Jane Groom, Marketing and Sales.Waters Corp. (Milford, MA; www.waters.com), no stranger to innovation, won Silver for its ACQUITY® QDa. The ACQUITY QDa detector adds a whole new dimension to separation science, and is the most progressive leap forward in chromatography detection since the first photodiode detectors were introduced decades ago (see Figure 2).
The QDa is novel in that it is a mass detector for chromatographers and is extremely easy to use. All they have to do is push a button—no tuning is required. The QDa detects more compounds than UV and eliminates the difficulty of implementing mass detection, which is very sensitive and specific. The advantages over UV detection are that it actually confirms the identity of peaks that you can see, and determines what they are and in what order.
When asked about the value of this product to the scientific community, Art Caputo, President of the Waters Division for Waters Corp., replied, “We foresaw a day when we could blend chromatography and mass spectrometry technologies together in a way that gives every analytical scientist access to mass spectral data regardless of their previous experience with mass spectrometry.”
He added, “On behalf of Waters employees worldwide, we are honored that the editors have recognized the new ACQUITY QDa detector at this year’s Pittcon. This marks the fourth time in the last 10 years that the editors have recognized a new Waters technology, reinforcing our innovation leadership role.”
Bronze Award: CESI 8000 System for Biologics Characterization
This year’s Bronze, awarded to AB SCIEX (Framingham, MA; www.absciex.com), was accepted by Edna Betgovargez, Market Manager. The new CESI 8000 System for Biologics Characterization is an innovative, high-performance separation-electrospray ionization system for mass spectrometry (MS). This new front-end CESI technology can be integrated with the well-established AB SCIEX TripleTOF® 5600+ mass spectrometry system into a seamless solution, to give biopharmaceutical scientists the ability to advance therapeutics discovery, research, and development through the lifecycle of the product.
With a single approach that increases efficiency and productivity, the CESI 8000 provides orthogonal and/or superior results compared to dual-method LC/MS-based approaches. From a single digest and run, users of CESI-MS gain the following: 1) identity and purity information with 100% coverage in a peptide map; 2) heterogeneity information with ultrasensitive glycopeptide quantitation; and 3) stability information identifying deamidation, cyclization, and oxidation—all highly important to biopharmaceutical scientists.
“On behalf of our entire team, we are pleased to receive the Pittcon Editors’ Bronze Award. We believe this product represents a real breakthrough in the separation and ionization of therapeutic biologics, establishing a new benchmark of improved system performance that allows CESI to be easily integrated into existing workflows in biopharmaceutical laboratories. This is innovation delivered to help save more lives and address the unmet needs of our customers in biopharma,” said Jeff Chapman, Director of the CE Business within SCIEX Separations, a part of AB SCIEX.
Award selection process
The selection process can be a challenging undertaking because of the diversity and large number of new products launched every year at Pittcon. Dr. Robert Stevenson, Editor of American Laboratory, commented, “For more than two decades, Pittcon has been the global forum to introduce products in separation science, primarily in chromatography. I recall thinking that the tag line on Pittcon—‘Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy’—was a misnomer. Spectroscopy was nearly dead. However, during the last three Pittcons, the tide has turned. Optical spectroscopy, including laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), Raman, and imaging, are in the forefront. Mass spectrometry is also very important. Yes, we live in interesting times.”
Honorable mentions
In addition to the three top recipients, there were 15 honorable mentions: Capture Mobile Data Recording App for Lab Informatics from Accelrys Inc. (San Diego, CA; www.accelrys.com); Liberty Blue microwave peptide synthesizer and Discover SPX microwave sample preparation system from CEM Corp. (Matthews, NC; www.cem.com); Spero Laser midIR Microscope from Daylight Solutions Inc. (San Diego, CA; www.daylightsolutions.com); Chorus Purelab water purification systems from ELGA LabWater VWS Ltd. (High Wycombe, England; www.elgalabwater.com); Halo ceiling-mounted air filtration system from Erlab Group (North Andover, MA; www.erlab.com); Ultima Expert ICP-OES from Horiba Ltd. (Kyoto, Japan; www.horiba.com); Micro GC Fusion Gas Analyzer from Inficon Holding AG (Bad Ragaz, Switzerland; www.inficon.com); Spinsolve 13C NMR instrument from Magritek Ltd. (Wellington, New Zealand; www.magritek.com); Select-eV variable energy ion source from Markes International Ltd. (Llantrisant, Wales; www.markes.com); DSC 214 Polyma from Netzsch Group (Selb, Germany; www.netzsch.com); VeriAir Flex sample bag from Nextteq LLC (Tampa, FL; www.nextteq.com); Progeny handheld Raman from Rigaku Corp. (Tokyo, Japan; www.rigaku.com), Z handheld LIBS from SciAps Inc. (Woburn, MA; www.sciaps.com); Dionex ERS 500 ion suppressor from Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (Waltham, MA; www.thermofisher.com); and ionKey/MS from Waters Corp. (Milford, MA; www.waters.com).
Conclusion
The Pittcon Editors’ Awards, in their nineteenth year, are managed and selected entirely by journalists attending the exposition. For more information on the awardees and to view video interviews, please visit www.pittcon.org/press.
Marian Nardozzi is Senior Marketing Communications Specialist, The Pittsburgh Conference, 300 Penn Center Blvd., Ste. 332, Pittsburgh, PA 15235, U.S.A.; tel.: 412-825-3220, ext. 203; fax: 412-825-3224; e-mail: [email protected]; www.pittcon.org