The Unrivalled Performance of Waters Xevo MS Systems is Driving Novel Analytical Methods

Making their Pittcon debut, Waters® Xevo™ family of mass spectrometers – the Xevo QTof, a quadrupole time-of-flight (QTof) mass spectrometer (MS) and Xevo TQ MS, a tandem quadrupole mass spectrometer - feature unrivalled, patented technologies that are driving novel analytical methodologies. Unique technologies make the Xevo family of mass spectrometers the most sensitive and most versatile in the industry.

There may be no better example of the Xevo system’s impact than its ability to respond to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) bioanalytical guidelines for the pharmaceutical industry issued in 2008. The main focus of the guidelines is control, understanding and elimination of matrix effects, and the combined effect of all components of a sample other than the target analyte in bioanalytical assays. The new guidelines call for analysts to provide quantitative information on analytes of interest and qualitative information on the matrix, requiring full scan MS and multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) data analyses respectively. Conventional tandem quadrupole MS instruments require separate analyses to acquire analyte-specific and matrix-specific information. Xevo TQ is the only MS system on the market able to meet these requirements in a single run, thus reducing analysis time from hours to minutes.

Furthermore, Xevo customers are reporting they are experiencing a sustained improvement in the consistency of sample results from operator to operator and lab to lab. They attribute this phenomenon to Waters’ design philosophy of Engineered Simplicity™ built into the family of Xevo MS systems. Engineered Simplicity describes the ability of Waters MS instruments to provide pertinent information in the simplest manner possible, allowing scientists to convert data into critical business and organizational knowledge faster and with greater assurance. The importance of instrument-to-instrument and lab-to-lab reproducibility is further heightened in today’s pharmaceutical industry environment with more manufacturers relying on contract research organizations than at any other time in history.

“The competitive and profitability advantages of reducing ‘time-to-market’ are well documented, but for our research-based customers an equally important goal is reducing ‘time-to-meaning’,” said Brian Smith, Vice President, Mass Spectrometry Operations for the Waters Division. “The novel approach of using the Xevo TQ MS system to meet the FDA guidelines is a clear demonstration of how the system truly liberates scientists. Now they can get the answers they need, faster than ever before. That, in turn, frees up more of their time to focus on what they do best: studying the results and figuring out what they mean.”

The Most Versatile TQ and Most Sensitive Benchtop QTof Systems
Waters Xevo TQ MS System is an advanced tandem quadrupole mass spectrometer that tackles the most demanding quantification applications for target compounds at low concentrations in highly complex and diverse samples. The Xevo TQ MS System uses ScanWave™, a unique collision cell technology based on a novel use of Waters' proven T-Wave™ technology.

In awarding the Xevo TQ system the Best New Product at ASMS 2008, Instrument Business Outlook wrote, “The Xevo’s novel collision cell design enables it to operate in T-Wave™ mode or in Waters’ more recently developed ScanWave mode. T-Wave has the effect of significantly improving the fast scanning abilities of tandem MS. Perhaps the more interesting capability is the ScanWave mode of the collision cell, which helps Xevo to significantly increase the signal intensity of both parent and product ion spectra.”

The most sensitive benchtop QTof system on the market, Waters Xevo QTof is an exact mass MS/MS and when paired with Waters ACQUITY® UltraPerformance LC® (UPLC®) offers a one of a kind UPLC system performance. For market specific applications, Xevo QTof uniquely enables UPLC/MSE data acquisition in a benchtop system. UPLC/MSE captures “all of the data all of the time” at unparalleled speeds to maximize the amount of information collected from minimal sample amounts.

New Ion Sources Extend Xevo Instrument Versatility
The advanced ion source for the Xevo family of mass spectrometers not only delivers class-leading UPLC/MS performance, it has also been designed to extend the versatility of the instruments. Using the Xevo plug and play architecture, laboratories can swap between LC, GC and solids analysis in a matter of minutes. This gives scientists the unique ability to analyze everything from proteins to volatile organics on a single system. The new Atmospheric Pressure GC (APGC) source enables high sensitivity GC/MS to be performed on either a quadrupole time-of-flight or tandem quadrupole mass spectrometry platform. Likewise, atmospheric pressure solid probe (ASAP) enables direct, rapid, analysis of solids or neat liquids, like urine or crude oil, without sample prep.

This unique combination of capabilities for a single instrument will have a significant impact on laboratory versatility and capability.

Waters is currently shipping both Xevo QTof and Xevo TQ systems worldwide.