Customers of the three leading brands are significantly more satisfied with their most recent mass spectrometer acquisition than purchasers of other brands
According to a recent survey of life scientists using mass spectrometry (MS) in their research, Applied Biosytems/MDS Sciex is the leading mass spectrometer brand in all regions and market segments, followed by Agilent Technologies and Thermo Finnigan.
Customers of these three leading brands are significantly more satisfied with their most recent mass spectrometer acquisition than purchasers of other brands - as compared to other market players such as Waters, Bruker Daltonics, and PerkinElmer Life and Analytical Sciences.
These findings were recently published by BioInformatics in its latest report - Mass spectrometry: opportunities in the life science market.
Based on a survey of more than 600 scientists who use mass spectrometry, the report provides a comprehensive look at researchers' experimental design, instrument specifications and future purchasing plans, and assesses opportunities for suppliers to expand their reach into markets characterised by key parameters such as application, instrumentation type, sample complexity and throughput.
Suppliers in this market will benefit from the 19% of current mass spectrometer users who have plans to purchase a new instrument - the majority of whom will do so within the next year.
These scientists are most likely to seek new mass spectrometers that have greater mass accuracy, the ability to perform more applications and greater sensitivity, and most respondents anticipate acquiring them from Applied Biosystems/MDS Sciex and Thermo Finnigan.
"Current brand usage and/or most recent MS purchase are strong predictors of future brand purchase, but are not absolute indicators.
"Other factors, such as research objective, MS applications and motivation for purchase will all enter into the decision to obtain one system as compared to another," predicted Robin Rothrock, director of market research at BioInformatics.
A particularly noteworthy application for mass spectrometry is quantitative proteomics, which has important implications in several areas of research, including protein biomarker discovery and validation/screening.
Numerous suppliers are already developing products - from labelling chemistries to sophisticated software - to meet the needs of this emerging market, which is predicted to grow among both current and future mass spectrometer users.
"The difficulties associated with experimental design, interpretation of the results, and reagent/instrumentation cost remain significant barriers to widespread adoption.
"New approaches to labelling as well as novel software for data analysis and interpretation have been developed by suppliers to address these issues.
"However, given the nascent state of the market and the relatively small number of actual practitioners, methods for quantitative proteomics are still in flux," said Rothrock.
To help suppliers overcome these challenges, the report explores quantitative proteomics techniques, including their adoption, scientists' satisfaction with them, and the developments needed to encourage widespread use of this exciting technology.
The report also has implications for the suppliers of kits and reagents used in high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), gel electrophoresis and other sample preparation techniques.
While HPLC is the sample preparation protocol used most frequently by those surveyed, a handful of key MS applications such as protein digest analysis and multi-protein complex characterisations rely on more manual and labour-intensive preps.
Scientists conducting these analyses predominately utilise protein digestion and 1D/2D gels plus protein digestion, respectively, to prepare their samples - presenting suppliers with an opportunity to target their protein separation products to these researchers.
