History of Mass Spectrometry Companies

This article examines how the major players in mass spectrometry technology came into existence what’s their formation histories reveal about how analytical-instrument companies are built. Whilst some firms have well documented origins, others leave only fragmented public records. Despite this, clear patterns emerge when the development of mass spectrometry instrumentation companies are viewed at a structural level.

Infographic from SeparationScience - https://www.sepscience.com/the-evolution-of-mass-spectrometry-6516

Broadly, mass spectrometry companies tend to form in one of several ways:

• Spin out from university research group

• Licensing of academic intellectual property from a university research group to be commercialised

• Instrumentation contract research company that is contracted to help solve a narrowly defined industrial problem

• A large corporation creates a spin off due to antitrust requirements or a desire to decentralize highly specialised technical divisions

The mass spectrometry market is dominated by a small number of large diversified instrument companies including: Agilent Technologies, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Danaher Corporation, Waters Corporation, Bruker Corporation, Shimadzu Corporation, PerkinElmer, Jeol Ltd, Jasco, Teledyne Technologies Inc, MKS instruments, Ametek and Hitachi High-Tech Corporation. Together these companies define the current analytical infrastructure of chemistry, biology and clinical science.

Waters

In 1958, James Logan Waters founded Waters Associates in an office in the basement of a police station in Framingham, Massacheusetts. Waters Associates was a research boutique, companies would contract Jim and his 5 employees to build one of a kind instruments for various purposes. Early products included a boiler feedwater flame photometer, a balloon hydrometer, a nerve gas detector, a lab refractomer and process control refractometers. In 1962, a small stake was sold to Hardie Sheppard, a venture capitalist with the firm Payson and Trask, whom he’d met at a chemical industry trade show. Sheppard provided the company with $150,000 as its first external financing raise.

Dow Chemical requested Water to design a refractometer. Dow had designed a method of analysing polymers using gel columns. Water negotiated an exclusive license to the patent. In 1963, Water’s produced its first five gel permeation chromatography instruments. Dow chemical invested $400,000 in Waters.

Since its invention in 1952, gas chromatography (GC) had reigned supreme as the most prevalent analytical technique; but only ~15% of the million well-characterized organic compounds were volatile and capable of analysis by GC. The remaining 85% were non-volatile polymers, carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, amino acids and other compounds. In 1965, the technique of liquid chromatography (LC) was a mere curiosity. That year, Waters Associates embarked on its first LC system project. James wrote, “We believe LC can become a mass market, which will extend far beyond the research laboratory into production, quality control and clinical testing.”

To jump-start their LC project, they licensed the design of a liquid-liquid chromatograph from Shell Development in Modesto, CA, but discovered that the RI detector drifted wildly. Waters switched to UV detection and liquid-solid packing. Creating the ALC 100, the first waters LC system. In the early days of LC, “everybody said that LC would never succeed. They said it would always be 100 times slower than GC. We just didn’t understand the physics that applied applied to separations in a liquid chromatography columns,” – James.

Woodward and vitamin B12

Woodward had won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1965 for his work synthesizing chlorophyll. “Woodward was trying the synthesize vitamin B12, but the molecule kept rearranging. He wanted us to purify the positional isomers, which were needed to give him the right compounds for the final stages of the synthesis,” James recounted

James agreed to give it a try while Woodward left for a trip to Europe. Working with Dr. Hamber, it took a week and 3 days to figure out how to do it and they ended up isolating and purifying 200 mg of the precursor compound. Emboldened by success, James had his photo taken with Woodware, obtained a mailing list of 1,200 U.S. organic chemistry professors and made and mailed copies of that photo and a letter to each professor on the list. The letter read in part, “Look what we did for Woodward-can we help you?”

110 professors responded and Jim phoned each one personally. The company continued to grow and merge / acquire other companies making it into the billion dollar company it is today (link).

There were less history resources for these companies. The information mainly comes from the companies Wikipedia pages and websites.

Agilent Technologies

Agilent was established in 1999 as a spin-off from Hewlett-Packard (HP) electronic and bio-analytical test and measurement instruments. HP is an American multinational information technology company. In 1965 HP branched out into scientific equipment by acquiring F&M Scientific, maker of gas chromatographs.

The split of Agilent from HP was predicated on the difficulty of growing HP’s revenue stream and on the competitive vigour of smaller more agile competitors. The Agilent spin-off was accompanied by an initial public offering which raised $2.1 billion, setting a record at the time. (F&M Scientific began as a part-time basement operation by an employee of U.S. chemical giant DuPont)

Thermo Fisher

Thermo Electron was co-founded in 1956 by George N. Hatsopoulos and Peter M Nomikps. The company focused on providing analytical and laboratory product. Fisher Scientific was founded in 1902 by Shester G. Fisher from pittsburg. It focused on providing laboratory equipment, chemicals, supplies and services used in healthcare, scientific research, safety and education. The companies merged in 2006.

Ion Mobility / Mass Spectrometry Companies

Purspec Technologies

Purpsec was founded in 2014 by Professor Zheng Ouyang, a mass spectrometry expert during his tenure at Purdue University. The company specializes in point of care mass spectrometry and structural lipidomics solutions. Professor Ouyang is affiliated with the Department of Precision Instruments at Tsinghua University. The company has grown to employ over 100 experts and has established more than 60 core patents.

The company has developed its fifth generation of mass spectrometry instruments, providing portable mass spectrometry solutions for clinical diagnostics, environmental monitoring, security screening and scientific research.

MOBILion

Dr. Melissa Sherman’s background is in polymer chemistry. Initially she worked in a variety of areas, including technology, regenerative medicine, surgical products and the apparel industry. The company’s origin story began when Dr. Sherman worked for IP Group, an investment company funding early-stage technology, her jobs was to scout disruptive technologies at multiple US national labs. At the Pacific Nortwest National Laboratory (PNNL), she found a technology that excited her enough to take the leap from portfolio manager to CEO at a start-up. The technology was structures for lossless ion manipulation technology, invented in the lab of PNNL chemist Richard D. Smith Based on a type of ion mobility, SLIM separates ions in a device in which metal electrodes are patterned on printed circuit boards. Applying voltages to some of the electrodes creates conduits through which ions can float and move, even around corners, without hitting surfaces and being lost. Applying voltages to other electrodes creates a sinusoidal electric field—also called a traveling wave—that pushes ions through the device. Smaller ions move through the device faster than larger ones.

MOBILion calls its version of SLIM “high-resolution ion mobility,” or HRIM. In ion mobility, separation resolution improves as the length of the path over which the ions travel increases. Printed circuit boards let the company create serpentine patterns that allow long path lengths allowing it to fit in a small space, the company can thus achieve high-resolution separations in a compact device (link, link).

Excellims

Excellims was founded in 2005 by Dr. Paul Eisenbraun and Dr. Ching Wu and is based in Acton, Massachusetts. The company specialises in high performance ion mobility spectrometry. Dr. Wu was the research leader for GE Security’s chem/bio and explosives detection division, where he led and joined the developments of many of the ion mobility systems that are used throughout security, illicit drug detection and airport screening. Dr. Wu led a team that built on his research interests from his graduate study to advance IMS and mass spectrometry (MS) technology and develop cutting-edge instrumentation. In addressing the key challenges within the security sector, Dr. Wu and his team realized the commonalities with other applied markets, including the ever-increasing demand for high-quality QC in the pharmaceutical industry. Since then, Excellims has been revolutionizing IMS systems for a range of applications and has rapidly evolved into the advanced instrument manufacturer it is today.

In 2014 Thermo Fisher Scientific exclusively selected Excellims to provide HPIMS as a moduler addition to its mass spectrometers. This partnership made ion mobility mass spectrometry available to analytical labs worldwide. The company holds over 60 patents in IMS, MS and related technologies(link).

Lessons and Key Takeaways

Aside from their formation, MS companies could be further split into 5 archetypes.

1.      Platform builders. These companies sell general purpose analytical analysis infrastructure and become default choices for laboratories. Waters, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Agilent, Bruker. Their strength is in breadth, reliability, applications support and long term integration into regulated workflows.

2.      Component or physics innovators. These companies form around a new analyser, separation method or ion manipulation technique. Excellims, MOBILion. Their success depends less on scientific novelty than on whether that novelty can survive real world engineering, manufacturing and customer support.

3.      Appplication locked companies. These companies solve one problem extremely well. 908 devices (chemical threats), Bruker MALDI Biotyper (clinical microbiology), Owlstone (breath VOCs). They do not sell mass spectrometry but decisions, answers or outcomes.

4.      Enabling-technology or OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) companies. BaySpec, Tofwerk, Vacuum suppliers. These companies don’t sell to end users but provide critical subsystems that power other instruments. They form the backbone of much of the industry.

5.      Future-leaning or boundary companies. These sit at the edge of MS and don’t call themselves MS companies at all. They are IMS-only companies, ambient ionisation developers or AI-driven pattern recognition companies.

When researching mass spectrometry companies, a recurring pattern of scepticism towards new technologies becomes apparent. Though this is not unexpected for a scientific community whose fundamental method is falsifiability. Science does not offer absolute final truth. Instead, it offers the best available explanation for observed phenomena, which is accepted only until new evidence disproves it.

Yet history repeatedly shows that transformative technologies are often dismissed in their early stages. I keep finding examples of people pushing the barriers of technology being dismissed and the optimists end up discovering something incredible that has immense value. Earlier I mentioned how liquid chromatography faced resistance before its commercial success at Waters. The triple quadrupole spectrometer, developed by Chris Enke and Richard Yost was initially described as a “stupid toy” before becoming one of the most commercially and clinically impactful mass spectrometers developed. The article is titled “They called it a stupid toy. Now it makes billions and saves babies”(link).

Conclusions

Ultimately based on this analysis, I believe my company is most closely aligned with application locked companies. I aim for point of care diagnostics device that takes ion mobility spectrometry and mass spectrometry out of the lab and embeds them within a decision focused system. Rather than only prioritising maximal analytical performance, there will be a strong emphasis on pattern recognition to enable early prediction and preventative intervention.

A core design principle is that data generated today should retain long term value. As analytical understanding evolves and new biomarkers or pathways are discovered, previously collected samples should be re-interpretable, including signals from what is currently considered the “dark metabolome.”

As an initial pathway to market, pharmaceutical clinical trials may offer the most realistic entry point. Drug development environments can tolerate beta stage analytical technologies, provide structured validation frameworks, and generate high quality datasets. Success in this setting would allow progressive refinement of both technology and interpretation before expansion into broader clinical or consumer diagnostics.