Pittcon announces 2014 Editors’ Awards for innovative new instruments

Pittsburgh, PA – The Pittcon Editors’ Awards, managed and run by editors in the industry, are fast becoming an important event at Pittcon, the world’s largest annual conference and exposition for laboratory science. This year’s award recipients include Texas Instruments (Gold), Waters (Silver) and ABSciex (Bronze).

For a product to be considered for this prestigious award, the requirements are that it be the first time to be on display at a Pittcon exposition and must be a functioning instrument. Typically, winning products feature innovations in technology or industrial design or may enable new analytical applications.

Texas Instruments captured the Gold with its DLP^® NIR scan^TM evaluation module (EVM), based on the company’s DLP4500NIR polychromater, the principle of which has already been widely used in modern video projection methods.

“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.

Waters won Silver for its AQUITY^® QDa. The ACQUITY QDa Detector. The company says it 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.

When asked about the value of this product to the scientific community, Art Caputo, president of the Waters Division for Waters Corporation 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.”

This year’s Bronze went to ABSciex. The new CESI 8000 System for Biologics Characterization is a high-performance separation-electrospray ionization system for mass spectrometry. The new front-end CESI technology can be integrated with the well-established AB Sciex TripleTOF^® 5600⁺ mass spectrometry system, to give biopharmaceutical scientists the ability to advance therapeutics discovery, research and development through the life cycle of the product.

“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.