PITTCON 2003

Economic uncertainties, strong growth in selective areas, analytical Nobels, customer service, and new products are buzz of this year's instrument and lab equipment show

	PHOTO BY MITCH JACOBY

The U.S. conflict with Iraq was a common topic of conversation among attendees at the conference--which was held this year for only the second time in sunny Orlando, Fla., a venue that belied such serious talk with its squeaky-clean and good-natured artificiality.

There was an increased emphasis on bioterrorism at this year's conference, according to 2003 Pittcon President Mildred B. Perry, who is also a physical scientist and senior analyst at the Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh.

Despite a generally poor economy, a then-looming war in Iraq, and cutbacks in business travel budgets, Pittcon registration figures held up fairly well. Total registration was 22,628--down less than 3% from 2002, when 23,270 people attended. The number of exhbiting organizations was up 10% to 1,260, but the number of booth spaces was down 2%.

For the first time this year, Pittcon hosted a "conference within a conference"--Laboratory Informatics 2003 (http://www. limsconference.org), organized by the Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) Institute in Pittsburgh. The miniconference included symposia and a special area of the Pittcon exposition dedicated to LIMS and lab automation.

INSTRUMENT BUSINESS. Uncertainties in the analytical instrument and testing business were a major topic of conversation on the Pittcon exposition floor this year. According to Tanya Samazan, managing editor of the newsletter Instrument Business Outlook, "2002 was a year of restructuring and reorganizations for analytical instrument companies." A number of instrument makers combined business units and nearly all "announced cost-cutting initiatives, which in many cases included layoffs."

"Life sciences remains the fastest growing market," Samazan said, "but some of its luster has faded due to cautious spending by the pharmaceutical and biotech industries last year and the announcement earlier this year of President [George W.] Bush's fiscal 2004 budget request, which includes only a 2% increase for the National Institutes of Health budget."

According to Lawrence S. Schmid, president and chief executive officer of Strategic Directions International, Los Angeles, the publisher of Instrument Business Outlook, "The global analytical and life sciences instrument industry recorded revenues of about $24 billion in 2002, while revenues from laboratory equipment such as centrifuges, fume hoods, and heating and cooling equipment totaled about $3.5 billion. Last year's growth varied by sector, with instrumentation systems, aftermarket, and service revenues increasing at over 8% from 2001, while lab equipment grew at only about 5%. Life sciences instrumentation saw double-digit growth, while traditional instruments focused on materials analysis experienced only a 4% expansion."

Alex Sands, editor of the industry newsletter Instrumenta, said the market "weathered a tough year in 2002. It is, of course, not immune to the general economic cycle and has been affected by a general corporate cutback in capital equipment spending by its customers."

The fragmented nature of the instrument business "makes it difficult to predict the total market," Sands told C&EN, "but Instrumenta estimates the analytical instrumentation industry was worth around $20 billion and exhibited growth of around 5 to 8% in 2002." According to the newsletter's most recent industry scoreboard, the six leading manufacturers of analytical instrumentation by revenue (in alphabetical order) are Agilent, Amersham Biosciences, Applied Biosystems, PerkinElmer, Thermo Electron, and Waters.

"Though most of these companies have other businesses as well, each has analytical instrumentation and lab equipment revenues of around $1 billion or greater annually," Sands said. Of the six leading companies, "Thermo Electron and Applied Biosystems stand out as the largest, with Thermo addressing the broad analytical instrumentation market and Applied Biosystems leading in bioanalytical tools."

An extraordinary factor in the business of late is that "governments around the world increased funding for homeland security, providing a boon for suppliers of analytical technologies for these applications," Sands noted. There has been particularly strong growth, for example, in ion mobility spectrometry-based systems--used in airports for detecting trace explosives and chemicals--and in other trace detection equipment. "Such growth is expected to continue for some time as funding from governments around the world in this area filters down into sales," Sands said. The Chinese market for scientific instruments has been growing especially fast.

DNA sequencer sales have been disappointing, but some genomics and proteomics instrument makers have experienced strong growth, says Sands, who is also editor of the genomics and proteomics business newsletter Genomika. For example, sales increased 27% last year for microarray pioneer Affymetrix, he notes. And mass spectrometry (MS) instrument sales have been strong, owing to growth in protein studies and life sciences applications. "Mass spectrometer sales to the life sciences sector grew at over 20% in 2002, to around $700 million," he said. "Although the growth is expected to slow, double-digit rates are still expected for at least the next few years."

Research analyst Jennie Tsai of Gabelli & Co., Rye, N.Y., who also follows the analytical instrument industry, agrees that MS is doing well. According to her estimates, she said, "the MS market in 2002 grew in the mid-teen percent range, consistent with growth rates in the past few years and driven mainly by proteomics for drug discovery."

For the coming year, "my impression so far of capital spending is that there is weakness in some areas," Tsai said. Some pharmaceutical and biotech companies "have to spend on capital equipment, and they are buying, while others are postponing purchases if R&D budgets are tight and they don't necessarily need to buy the new machines right now. We'll get a better sense of how 2003 will pan out as companies report in April and provide their outlook."

NOBEL YEAR. The popularity of MS was also reflected in plenary lectures held at Pittcon by two legends in the field. One is emeritus professor of chemistry Fred W. McLafferty of Cornell University, who did groundbreaking MS mechanistic studies and who has a gaseous ion reaction named after him (the McLafferty rearrangement), among other achievements. The other is emeritus professor of chemistry John B. Fenn of Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, who shared half of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (with Koichi Tanaka of Shimadzu Corp., Kyoto, Japan) for "development of soft desorption ionization methods for MS analyses of biological macromolecules."

The other half of the 2002 chemistry Nobel went to Kurt Wüthrich of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, Calif., "for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution." So it was a good Nobel year for analytical chemistry all around.

In his Pittcon plenary lecture, McLafferty cited a number of groundbreaking contributions MS has made to biomedical research in past years:

• Chemistry professor Carol V. Robinson of the University of Cambridge, in England, and coworkers transferred massive biomolecular structures such as ribosome particles and virus capsids into the gas phase in intact form to facilitate studies of their interactions.
• A group led by chemistry professor Alan G. Marshall of Florida State University, Tallahassee, set a world record for mass resolving power--approximately half-millidalton resolution--while achieving baseline separation of two peptides with different composition but the same nominal mass.
• Chemistry professor Donald F. Hunt of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, and coworkers devised techniques that have permitted routine MS-based sequencing of peptides, proteins, and, increasingly, DNA as well, as a complement to the use of conventional peptide, protein, and DNA sequencers.

And Fenn gave what he referred to as an "archaeological expedition" of the history of electrospray ionization (ESI), the technology for which he shared the Nobel Prize. Since Fenn's group developed the technique in the early 1980s, ESI has become an essential tool for the MS analysis of extremely large biomolecules.

NEW PRODUCTS. More than most scientific meetings, Pittcon is dominated by its massive exposition, and this year was no exception. Some indication of highly regarded introductions emerges each year from the Pittcon Editors' Awards for best new products. This annual informal poll of editors and journalists covering Pittcon was organized this year by consultant Brenda Wilkinson of Kymaera, East Grinstead, England.

In all, 21 products were nominated by 18 editors. (C&EN editors did not participate.) MS instrumentation was especially well represented among the nominations, according to Wilkinson, but the top winner was Dionex's ICS-2000 reagent-free ion chromatograph. According to Dionex, the system is "the first totally integrated and preconfigured reagent-free ion chromatograph designed to perform all types of electrolytically generated isocratic and gradient ion chromatography separations using conductivity detection." The reagent-free feature automates the preparation of eluents (separation solvents) and regenerants (resin restoratives), eliminating the usual need to prepare them manually.

Second place in the competition went to Thermo Electron for the Finnigan LTQ FT, which the company describes as the first hybrid ion-trap and Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometer. The system's high mass resolution and high mass accuracy make it possible to analyze complex mixtures faster. "Despite the price tag of $750,000, this is new technology, and it could take off like a scalded dog," said one member of the editors' panel.

Tying for third place in the competition were Leco's Pegasus 4D, an automated two-dimensional gas chromatography and time-of-flight MS system that speeds chromatographic analyses and improves separation capability, and Ionalytics' Selectra, an add-on that uses an ion mobility spectrometry-based ion-filtering mechanism to improve the performance of existing mass spectrometers.

	PHOTO BY MITCH JACOBY
	IT WORKS THIS WAY Instrument demonstration (top photo) on Pittcon exposition floor. Participants in Centcom breakfast session were (from left) Jarke, Braunschweiler, Hach-Darrow, and Wilkinson.
	PHOTO BY STU BORMAN

CUSTOMER SERVICE. Analytical instrument companies are increasingly emphasizing customer service to improve their bottom lines, and this topic was highlighted in presentations at a Pittcon 2003 breakfast sponsored by Centcom, the American Chemical Society's advertising management unit.

In her breakfast talk, Kathryn Hach-Darrow--former president, chief operating officer, and CEO of Hach Co., a water quality testing firm based in Loveland, Colo.--noted that for some 45 years, she flew small private corporate planes to towns and cities around the U.S. to meet with and assist water treatment lab personnel. "Did the airplanes pay their way?" she asked rhetorically. "Probably not in a strict accounting way, but in service to the customer as well as service to our employees, who had so much traveling to do, it was a terrific benefit."

Lukas Braunschweiler, president and CEO of Dionex, noted that the company hires an outside firm to interview customers who have used Dionex customer service. Company officials then use this feedback to evaluate and "incentivize" Dionex customer service employees, and they make extensive efforts to address service shortcomings identified in the interviews.

And Lynn Jarke, vice president and general manager of sales, marketing, and support operations at Agilent's life sciences and chemical analysis division, discussed future technologies that she said could aid instrumentation customer service. These include real-time diagnostic systems that anticipate failures and alert service providers, systems to automate routine calibration and qualification tasks, and systems that permit instrument company technicians to identify and fix problems remotely.

In concluding the session, the chairman of the breakfast--consultant Gordon Wilkinson of Kymaera, founder of the newsletter Analytical Instrument Industry Report, the predecessor of Instrumenta--quoted the late industrialist and General Motors president William S. Knudsen: "A big corporation is more or less blamed for being big, but it is only big because it gives service. If it doesn't give service, it gets small faster than it grew."

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