Thermo Fisher Scientific, based in Waltham, Mass., has been recognized for its research and development prowess.
Two of its instruments are winners of R&D Magazine's R&D 100 Award for 2011: the Thermo Scientific Evolution 200 series UV-Vis spectrophotometer and the Thermo Scientific Dionex ICS-5000 capillary ion chromatography system. The R&D 100 Awards highlight the most significant technological advances of the past year across medical, industrial, research, consumer and manufacturing applications.
”Our company won its first R&D 100 award in 1969, and since then we’ve continued to set the highest standards for R&D excellence,” said Dr. Ian Jardine, vice president, global research and development, Thermo Fisher Scientific. “This recognition is important because it demonstrates how seriously we take our commitment to customers to deliver new products that accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.”
The Evolution 200 spectrophotometer is designed for routine QA/QC analyses in the life science, food and beverage, and material science industries. Increasingly, companies focused on ISO 9000, Good Laboratory Practice (GLP), Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) and other quality initiatives are relying on UV-visible spectrophotometers to confirm product quality and integrity. U.S. Food and Drug Administration-required tablet dissolution testing, for example, which helps assess the quality of tablets and capsules, is one of many applications where the speed, precision and higher performance made the Evolution 200 worthy of recognition.
The Dionex ICS-5000, the world's first capillary ion chromatography (IC) system according to the company, is used in the environmental, food and beverage, bioscience and power-generation industries. The ICS-5000 is used to identify and measure contaminants in water and other liquids, whether environmental or produced by disinfection processes that may affect water quality. A soft drink bottler, for example, could use this system to test raw and treated water used in its beverages for contaminants such as bromate and oxyhalides.
Thermo Fisher had revenue of nearly $11 billion in 2010, has 37,000 employees and serves customers within pharmaceutical and biotech companies, hospitals and clinical diagnostic labs, universities, research institutions and government agencies, as well as in environmental and process control industries.