ACD/Labs at PittCon 2006

Pittcon® 2006, the largest North American conference and exposition on laboratory science and instrumentation, proved to be another successful show for Advanced Chemistry Development, Inc. (ACD/Labs).

Over the years, the show has become the preferred venue for conferees to present their scientific data and to gain valuable insights from the work of others; this year was no different.

As always, exhibitors at Pittcon unveiled novel technologies or introduced new or enhanced products. This year, ACD/Labs launched ACD/IntelliXtract, an innovative new LC/MS software package for automated molecular weight identification and LC/MS data interpretation. This new software will drastically reduce the amount of time it takes analysts to process their LC/MS data, and help them extract even more information from their data.

Each year, the Pittcon Editors' Awards are bestowed on the best new products, as judged in an informal poll of journalists and editors covering the conference. With hundreds of new products introduced at Pittcon every year, the Editors' Awards represent an effort to develop "a consensus view" of the most newsworthy products. This year, ACD/IntelliXtract received an Honorable Mention for Best New Product at Pittcon.

From their booth on the trade show floor, ACD/Labs also displayed the most recent launch of their software, version 9.0, which continues to aid chemical research scientists worldwide with spectroscopic validation of structures, and identification and elucidation of unknown substances. With version 9.0, ACD/Labs expanded their offerings to several areas of analytical research in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries, such as impurity and degradant identification, metabolism research, chromatographic method development, lead optimization, and preformulation of novel drug agents.

Although many vendors complained of low booth traffic, the ACD/Labs booth staff was kept busy. Hot topics of conversation at the booth included IntelliXtract for automated molecular ion identification in LC/MS datasets, automated method development strategies for impurities in drug development, and our vendor-neutral software for UV-Visible and Infrared spectroscopy.

ACD/Labs’ staff and customers presented several talks at Pittcon which demonstrated cutting-edge technology for chromatographic and mass spectrometric data analysis. Highlights included Robyn Rourick, Kalypsys, who showed how her laboratory was able to rapidly extract information from LC/MS datasets for metabolite and impurity identification. Mark Bayliss, ACD/Labs, affirmatively answered the question, "Is it Possible for Software to Automatically Determine the Molecular Ion for Each Chromatographic Peak in an LC/MS Dataset?". Michael McBrien, ACD/Labs, presented two talks and a poster about advances in automated HPLC method development, including a presentation about automated peak tracking from run to run, even for very small peaks. Many people were so excited about automated peak tracking that they had to stop by the booth to find out more! Finally, Michael Boruta, ACD/Labs, demonstrated how to accelerate salt and polymorph screening in preformulation research.

Antony Williams, VP and Chief Science Officer for ACD/Labs, further stated,” Year after year, our presence at Pittcon is rewarded with a glowing response from the scientists visiting our booth to discuss our most recent innovations. IntelliXtract is set to have a dramatic impact on the mass spectrometry community and we are certainly honored to have been recognized with the award at the initial launch. What better place than Pittcon to expose the latest advances in our ongoing quest to become the dominant standard in ChemAnalytics—the integration of chemical structures with analytical data.”

Further information about ACD/Labs' software solutions can be found by visiting the article's webpage.