Medical Device Link.

Estimated to grow from $3.4 billion in 2007 to $4.7 billion in 2013, with a compound annual growth rate of 5.4%, the liquid chromatography (LC) market is seeing plenty of technological advances, according to a report from Kalorama Information (New York City). Although the market has been mature for quite awhile, companies have continued to introduce new systems that perform fast LC and ultra-high-pressure LC (UHPLC). The industry’s goals are to improve throughput and resolution, mostly through the use of smaller-particle-size columns. This push for miniaturization and better throughput has led to the development of UHPLC systems running at much higher maximum pressures—and some at much higher temperatures—causing extremely high flow rates. As a result, there is demand for new types of components.

A major trend has been diversification into various applications, which has resulted in suppliers’ introducing systems tailored for specific applications or industries. Clinical applications ranging from genetic analysis to veterinary to toxicology have been increasingly utilizing HPLC. These areas provide new market opportunities but also present new challenges for suppliers. Acquisitions and mergers have resulted in an effort to meet these needs. These deals sometimes involve comarketing, as Waters did with Applied Biosystems, Hitachi, and Shimadzu for its unprecedented Acquity UPLC. LC companies have also been collaborating with software companies on compatibility in such fields as chemoinformatics.

LC has been used regularly in laboratories for years. Its primary function is to separate mixtures, identify a mixture’s components, and quantify those components. In a lesser amount of applications, LC is used for purification. As opposed to purification applications, analytical LC has few competing technologies—there are not many methods for separating a complex mixture without destroying it.

The industries in which LC is used to analyze samples include pharmaceutical and biotechnology labs (half of all revenues), academia, agriculture, food and beverage, chemicals and petroleum, electronics and semiconductors, environmental labs, government, and hospitals.

Despite rapid advances in LC technology recently, adoption of UHPLC and fast LC products by laboratories has been modest in the five years since the first of these systems was introduced.