New Mass Spectrometers Introduced and Current Use of "UPLC" from Recent American Society on Mass Spectrometry Conference

Implications: The recent ASMS conference show cased several vendors including Thermo, Waters and Agilent that introduced new triple quadrupole mass spectrometers that are meant to compete with the API4000 and API5000 from Applied Biosystems.  This could change the competitive landscape in the quantitative bioanalysis markets for triple quadrupole mass spectrometers. A workshop at the ASMS conference discussed the use of sub 2 um particles for HPLC/MS applications.  Waters calls this type of HPLC, "UPLC" however other vendors, Agilent, Shimadzu, Supelco (Sigma) have competing technologies.  This conference gave a great descriptive overview of the current practices in the pharmaceutical industry of sub 2 um HPLC.

Analysis:

The recent introductions of new triple quadrupole mass spectrometers from Agilent, Thermo and Waters could reduce the market share of Applied Biosystems triple quadrupole mass spectrometers.  More details will be available as these instruments are in use in the coming year.

 

The discussions of "UPLC" and sub 2 um particle HPLC could change how people apply these technologies in their labs.  In summary many of the experts in the field suggested that "UPLC" type results were possible with conventional yet optimized equipment.  Thus the need to purchase specialized systems from vendors to do HPLC may not be necessary.  Additionally, several of the experts noted clogging and low life spans of "UPLC" type columns.  Other competitive technologies such as fused core HPLC particles were shown to compete with "UPLC" without the high back pressure.  The ideas presented could influence how users purchase "UPLC" type systems from such vendors as Waters, Agilent, etc.