Moving To A Chromatography-Free World?

Bruker’s new mass spectrometry manufacturing site was officially opened in Bremen in May 2024. LCGC International spoke to Jeffrey Zonderman, Senior Vice President of Bruker Applied MS, about the opening of the new facility, current trends in mass spectometry, and moving to a “chromatography-free” world.

What is the rationale behind Bruker setting up the new mass spectrometry facility in Bremen?

The new MS facility was established to deal with the expected growth of both the company and MS technologies, primarily driven by the success of trapped ion mobility spectrometry (TIMS). We expect big things from this, as well as technologies that we are launching at upcoming conferences.

How long has it taken from the initial idea to build the site to the official opening day?

I have been with the company two years and this was well underway when I started. It was at least four or five years from the initial idea to the actual execution.

Is there any particular reason why Bremen was chosen as a location?

Bruker is historically located here. The manufacturing and primary research facility for mass spectrometry was already here. And there is also an employee base of 800 people. If it was moved somwhere else we would not retain the expertise, or the quality of employees that we have built. It is amazing that you can build a complex MS system and ship it to anywhere in the world, install it and start doing research or running samples, but it is the people that actually know how to do this that make this possible. The expertise of the Bremen team ensures that we do not skip a beat.

What type of MS instruments are you building in Bremen?

We build the whole range of MS instruments in Bremen: Triple quadrupole, (QqQ), quadrupole time-of-flight (QTOF), matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF), trapped ion mobility spectometry time-of-flight (timsTOF) and Fourier transform (FT).

What are the main trends in mass spectrometry in the analytical chemistry community at the moment?

There is a continual push for increased performance in areas where Bruker is very strong. For example, in life science research and that is the Bruker sweet spot really and where we have grown, particularly with the timsTOF instrument–and that is not changing. There is a need to dive deeper, and there is more dynamic range and sensitivity and selectivity that need to be achieved. And certainly, timsTOF came along and changed the game and Bruker became a major player in proteomics research because of it–and there is more of that to come.

Researchers and scientists are just scratching the surface with the tools they have today. So there are more tools coming, and Bruker is in a really strong position with high ultimate resolution technology. Ion mobility technology is here to stay. It is the future. High end mass spectrometry is not going away.

So it is going to continue to grow in the research areas, but there is a move into more applied markets. I won’t call them non-research because the applications people do research as well. We are taking the technologies that have been developed for core research and moving them over into the more routine markets.

This level of user wants a simpler system, a more cost-effective system and a more sustainable system. And that is really a lot of what my team is looking at: How do we take ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) and DART technologies and develop solutions where we can perhaps reduce the need for chromatography to separate in other ways—or not at all, if they are not needed. We are getting a lot of positive response from the market. We explore how we can enter a particular sector and ask: “What if we can move the analysis from minutes to seconds for each sample?” and “What if we could remove all your chromatography solvents in organic waste?” Maybe not the sample extraction, but at least when you are running the samples. “What if we can remove about 95% of your organic waste in that whole assay overall and make it more sustainable?” If you are running ten triple quadrupoles in an LC–MS system you are generating a massive amount of organic waste.

There are definitely more segments where you can minimize chromatography or do separations a different way that are more sustainable and have better return on investment (ROI).

We have also built a site that is more sustainable. The site will operate with 100% green energy in the near future. It has been built according to LEED standards and is ISO 50001 and ISO 14001 saccredited for Energy Management and Environmental Management Systems.

I think the real differentiation amongst vendors is to produce products that are more sustainable so that customers can be more sustainable–and they are asking for that in a big way.

What applications is chromatography-free MS being used in?

I came from an industry that typically used a chromatography-free method for a type of targeted screening. A good example of this was using direct analysis in real time mass spectometry (DART-MS) for an application for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). NIST has implemented this method across the United States. For drug seizures analysis where you can have a powder, a pill, or a liquid, no sample preparation is required, and you can do it in a very high throughput manner for qualitative analysis. Drug analysis is a big application. That’s historically what ambient ionization and DART–MS were used for initially.

ThIs is changing. Bruker is looking at actually moving into quantitative analysis, which is different because if you want to do quantitation the common thought is you need a peak and you need chromatography, or you cannot do quantitation.

This is what Bruker is exploring. We are looking at areas where chromatography-free exists today, which is using DART with a very powerful triple quadrupole mass spectrometer. Simple, fast sample preparation is where can remove chromatography.

In Massachusetts, our method development group is working on moving assays from chromatography for drug screening to chromatography-free analysis, and that’s really good. We have a lot of expertise from working with NIST moving from just analyzing the pills to looking at the drugs and metabolites in urine, blood and oral fluids.

We are also looking into food authentication and contaminants. Anything where there is a high volume requirement, where the chromatography is short and really used more as a cleanup, we can possibly replace that.

We are also doing chromatography-free in forensics and toxicology applications with simple drug assays, where we are looking at benzos, opiates, and other stimulants. These can all be done quantitatively dried, and we can move the analysis from minutes for each analysis to seconds and get the same high-quality results.

A classic example is the drug crisis in the United States. It is difficult to keep up with the drug analyses that are required. A LC–MS system can possibly get through 100 samples. We have shown that for the same application, instead of achieving an analysis of 90–100 samples a day, we are doing 1500 samples a day.

Can you expand on what "chromatography-free" methods are being used outside life science?

The biggest market currently is forensic toxicology workflows, and we’re looking into contaminant analysis, including microplastics and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) for environmental monitoring. Ion mobility is a useful separation tool for very complex and challenging separations, such as dioxins, PFAS and other persistent organic pollutants (POPS). DART has also been used for polymer and additive analysis.

Bruker is very strong in polymer analysis using MALDI technology, so it’s very complementary for lot of polymer work. A lot of chromatography-free applications use MALDI or DART. I want to move “chromatography-free” into the LC–MS and GC–MS markets, to offer robustness, ease of use, a better ROI, and sustainability. Those are really the key factors.

The ultimate question: Is this the end of chromatography?

No, absolutely not! Don’t forget sample preparation is a form of chromatography. There are application areas, however, where chromatography can be replaced that we are looking into. In laboratories using triple quads to run many routine analyses, many of the important assays do not need chromatography anymore. In these cases we are talking about analysis times in seconds rather than minutes. Chromatography is always going to be important. There will be new versions of chromatography coming out, I’m sure for untargeted screening applications where you need a separation for the mass spectrometer to work properly. For example, a 500 residue pesticide screen will still need the fast separation of chromatography. But today, I think chromatography has a place alongside chromatography-free.

Will Bruker still be focusing on the instruments that can be hyphenated to chromatography systems?

Yes, absolutely. My group is looking at chromatography systems today and evaluating them to see what they do with our instrumentation for the best separations. I think chromatography is what most of the market uses today, so Bruker will continue to support this as it transitions over to chromatography-free for many applications.

About the Interviewee

Jeffrey Zonderman serves as the Senior Vice President of Bruker Applied Mass Spectrometry, a new division of the company focused on providing mass spectrometry-based solutions for the applied market segments such as forensics, food, environmental, industrial/polymer, and clinical research. Zonderman graduated from Northeastern University with a bachelor’s in biology and has been involved in mass spectrometry and chromatography for over 30 years. Before joining Bruker, he worked in applications, sales/marketing and general management roles. His previous position was CEO of IonSense Inc, a company focusing on ambient ionization technology and commercialized DART. Zonderman looks to expand the applications of DART technology, amongst others, for chromatography-free mass spectrometry-based workflows. Direct correspondence to: marketing.bams.emea@bruker.com