It’s Gold for Waters at Pittcon 2007

For the second time in three years, Waters Corporation has won the prestigious 2007 Pittcon^® Editors Gold Award for the best new product at the Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy (Pittcon).

In 2004, the Waters^® ACQUITY UPLC^® System took home the gold and this year it was the Waters Synapt™ High Definition MS™ (HDMS™) System that won the top prize at the 58th annual conference held Feb. 25 - March 2, 2007, in Chicago. The instrument made its debut in front of more than 20,000 analytical scientists and corporate executives attending Pittcon, the largest annual exposition on lab science.

“Synapt is designed to create new possibilities for scientists and researchers who want to take their research to the next level,” said Dr. Rohit Khanna, Vice President, Worldwide Marketing. “We are thrilled that such an esteemed group has recognized this system as the best new product at Pittcon in 2007.”

Pittcon 2007 featured a vast array of new products and technology from more than 1,000 exhibitors from around the globe. In selecting the 2007 awards, more than 150 editors and reporters reviewed products they believed deserved the attention of their readers. The editors then met to share their ideas and cast their ballots for the gold, silver and bronze awards.

Used in small molecule research, protein characterization, metabolite identification and bio-pharmaceutical applications the Synapt HDMS system is the first mass spectrometer of its kind to combine high efficiency, ion mobility based, measurements and separations with high performance quadrupole, time-of-flight mass spectrometry.

The additional dimension of sample separation afforded by the system provides increased specificity and sample definition meaning scientists can extract more information from their samples, including the detection of components previously unseen by conventional mass spectrometers. Visualization and manipulation of the multi-dimension data produced by the system is performed by DriftScope™ Mobility Environment software, while operational control is provided by Waters MassLynx software.

Earlier this year, Waters announced that the world-renowned Max Planck Institute is enhancing its research on neurodegenerative diseases by adding a Waters Synapt HDMS System to its complement of research technologies. The Institute’s Department of Cellular Biochemistry recently took delivery of the Synapt HDMS System to study the role of proteins in causing brain-wasting diseases such as Huntington’s disease.

Oxford University is another Synapt HDMS System customer. The instrument will be used by the Department of Chemistry to study interactions between proteins and small molecules as well as interactions between proteins and other bio-macromolecules.

Shipments of the HDMS system commenced in December 2006.