Focus
A Glimpse into the Future Instrument
At the Financial Conference for the Analytical Instruments Industry, sponsored by the Scientific Apparatus Makers Association (SAMA) and held this past December in Boston, major instrument company executives provided attendees with a rare glimpse at some of their plans for the future. These plans include a personal computer-based laboratory management system, new robotics systems for sample preparation, and more powerful magnetic resonance products. Michael Moore, vice-president and general manager of Perkin-Elmer's instrument group, sees more laboratory computerization and automation. One major Perkin-Elmer effort in this area involves continuing software development work on the company's laboratory information management system (LIMS), which, said Moore, is currently offered as a minicomputer-based product in the $50,000-$400,000 range. Moore estimated that the market for the minicomputer-based LIMS consists of approximately 4000 scientific laboratories worldwide, which translates to a total of about $600 million in sales revenues. But, according to Moore, minicomputers are no longer required to implement a LIMS; microcomputers such as the International Business Machines (IBM) Personal Computer AT or the Perkin-Elmer 7000 series of computers are now sufficiently powerful to meet the needs of many smaller labs. "Such a microcomputer-based LIMS will be developed and introduced in the near future," he said. It does not take a reckless leap of the imagination to surmise that PerkinElmer is probably itself involved in such an effort. "We estimate," said Moore, "that the micro- or PC-based
executives hint at future
LIMS will add approximately 12,000 labs or $500 million to this market." Computerization has also spurred automation, and Moore predicts that as the decade ends, the effect of automation will begin to be as profound as the computer's has been thus far. Analytical instrument automation originally involved dedicated accessories, such as autosamplers, that facilitated instrument operation, but the industry is now on the threshold of automation's second phase: robotization. "Within the next five years," said Moore, "robots will be produced to perform a variety of tasks in the lab, primarily in the area of sample preparation and delivery." Indeed, at last month's Pittsburgh Conference, Perkin-Elmer introduced its first lab robot. "Some of the sample preparation will not be preset, but will actually be determined in real time by the instruments themselves," Moore continued. "If the sample concentration is too high for the instrument to work properly, the robot will be told to add more diluent. We refer to this as soft automation, in contrast to the hard auto-
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plans
mation of earlier years." The software to make such a system work is very difficult to develop, Moore admitted, but the result will be very worthwhile—the transformation of the analytical laboratory "into a highly productive, flexible, auto-analysis center." Allen J. Lauer, president of Varian Associates instrument group, addressed himself primarily to the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) business, which he described as "Varian's fastest growing product line. Orders were up something like 27% last year, and in the U.S. we were up significantly above that. We expect to see strong continued growth in NMR through 1985 and, actually, through the end of the decade." Lauer explained that the field strengths of the superconducting magnets used in state-of-the-art NMR instruments have been rising. Today, 11.7-tesla magnets are available, and research efforts are presently attempting to provide 14-tesla magnets. "Higher magnetic fields are important," said Lauer, "because they allow the scientist to look at larger, more complex molecules by dispersing overlapping peaks. This is very important in the biomedical area, where the molecules are very large and complex." An important Varian effort in the biomedical field involves the company's agreement, announced this past November, to cooperate with Technicare Corporation (a Johnson & Johnson company) on in vivo NMR research. In his SAMA presentation, Lauer said that this project will result in the development of a small-animal NMR imager and spectrometer that will be offered "within about a year." S.A.B. 0003-2700/85/0357-398A$01.50/0 © 1985 American Chemical Society
