This year, the 70th annual Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy (Pittcon), held at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, PA, featured a number of new events and sessions. Included among them were a birthday celebration and the unveiling of the newly made-over Pete Conn, the conference mascot. Pittcon opened on Saturday, March 17, with 75 short courses (25 of which were new). The technical program began the following day, and the expo ran from March 19 to 21. With 1,234 booths and 713 exhibitors, 101 of which were new to Pittcon, the expo was similar in scale to last year’s. In contrast, conference attendance was up by about 1,000 people, with 12,541 attendees.
On the expo floor, the striking display at the booth of one of the new companies, Taiwan’s Tantti Laboratory, caught TDA’s attention. Tantti has developed a novel monolithic column with controlled, uniform pore size and structure through a process called In-Mold Polymerization. The columns, designed for bioseparation, can be tailored to customers’ specifications.
TDA also caught up with Axcend, whose miniaturized Focus LC system won a bronze Pittcon Excellence Award last year. David Politis, the company’s vice president of marketing, informed us that the instrument, which is now shipping, is fulfilling the previously unmet needs of customers for range of applications. He said that at the expo, many more enthusiastic potential customers encountering were encountering the system for the first time.
Another small, relatively new firm exhibiting at Pittcon was Gate Scientific. Last year, the company’s smartSENSE Temperature stir bar won a gold Pittcon Excellence Award. This temperature-sensing stir bar, paired with the Precision Hotplate, can be controlled wirelessly to monitor and manage the temperature and speed of mixing. This year, at its press conference, Gate Scientific introduced its smartSENSE pH stir bar, which, in addition to having the features of the smartSENSE Temperature stir bar, measures and relays a solution’s pH. Following last year’s lead, the new stir bar received the gold Pittcon Excellence Award for companies with sales of less than $10,000,000.
The press conference schedules for both Tuesday and Wednesday were filled, with what seemed to be more product introductions than in recent years past. Setting itself apart from the other firms in terms of technologies, JEOL presented its latest NeoScope (the JCM-7000 model was on display in the company’s booth), a benchtop SEM. The instrument’s features include magnification of up to 100,000x, Zeromag navigation (automatic navigation to focus on a sample’s areas of interest), automatic functions based on sample type, and an option enabling real-time analysis.
Among the several new products Shimadzu unveiled at its press conference was the winner of a gold Pittcon Excellence Award (for companies with sales exceeding $100,000,000), the Nexera UC Prep. The company offered a preview of the Nexera Semi-Prep SFC System, which was developed with the collaboration of pharmaceutical companies. A key feature of the system is its gas-liquid separator, which, according to Shimadzu, provides a higher ratio and lower carryover compared with previous SFC systems.
In its press conference, Thermo Fisher Scientific highlighted several new instruments and solutions for applied markets. Linda de Jesus, vice president and general manager, Chromatography and Mass Spectrometry Division, Thermo Fisher Scientific, explained that the company’s mission is to enable customers to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer. The new products fitting this description included Beer Craft software, for QA testing by the craft brewing industry, for the GENESYS 50 and GENESYS 150 spectrophotometers, the Dionex IonPac AS31 anion-exchange column for testing for contaminants in drinking water, and the Dioxin Analyzer Workflow (which includes the TSQ 9000 GC-MS/MS system) for food safety testing. In a conversation about the company’s outlook in the current economic environment, Ms. De Jesus told TDA that Thermo Fisher’s wide geographic presence and its diversity of product offerings position the company well to face many challenges that might arise.
TDA hopes that this year’s rise in attendance and increased product introductions are the beginning of a trend for Pittcon. We look forward to seeing whether this continues next year, when the conference will return to Chicago, running from Feb 28 to March 5.