MASStastic Voyage

The pharma market has seen dramatic changes over the last few years and these changes are continuing in 2013.  Gone are the days of cash-rich spendthrift departments attending meetings around the globe and purchasing every latest technology to hit the market.  Nowadays, justification for any spend is the norm, with all budgets trimmed to save costs.  

Instrument suppliers and meeting organisers need to recognise this paradigm shift and position value-added solutions. I witnessed one significant step last year, when AB SCIEX launched its MASStastic Tour across the USA prior to the annual American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) conference. Instead of asking customers to come to the vendor, this new approach involved taking instruments and scientific expertise out on the road in a mobile laboratory, directly to the customers. The result was a resounding success, with nearly 1,400 visitors from 30 cities across the USA. The obvious follow up was to export the idea to Europe.

It has been my pleasure to help drive (pun intended) this vision here in Europe. At the time of writing, the European MASStastic Voyage Tour has made 30 stops across the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland and Germany, including to individual customer sites, science parks, and big and small scientific meetings. More than 1,000 scientists have visited the mobile lab, which features as its centrepiece an operational AB SCIEX QTRAP® 4500 System with an Eksigent micro LC system (I have lost count of the number of astounded visitors who have asked me, “Is it really running?”). Actually, the tour is quite a testament to the robustness of the 4500 System. It has been trucked over thousands of kilometers and endured temperatures so low that all of the LC eluents freeze solid, and yet it has started up every morning without fail. It is hard to imagine the MS systems of just a few years ago coping with even a weekly power-off and  -on.  

The mobile lab is also equipped with shell instruments, including the AB SCIEX TripleTOF® 5600+ and QTRAP® 6500 System, as well as instruments from our partners Phenomenex and Peak Scientific. Visitors have been able to bring and run their own samples, to ask technical questions from our experts, and to attend seminars on clinical, food, environmental and proteomics applications. The partnership of Phenomenex, Peak Scientific and AB SCIEX has provided an interactive experience for an end-to-end LC/MS/MS solution.

Our goal – meeting our customer base and bringing them up to date with the latest techniques and technologies without the need for them to spend time away from their base – has been achieved.  Of course, there were some bumps along the way. At one site, a new building construction prevented access, and the arctic conditions experienced at certain locations undoubtedly kept some people from venturing outside. But what will live in my memory are the scientists I met who were appreciative of the opportunity to attend a seminar and to see the latest technologies without the need to travel great distances or spend a significant time away from their lab. The organizers of scientific meetings provided fantastic support, seeing the value of bringing something new and exciting to conference-goers.  

So, is taking the message to the customer base the way forward?  I certainly believe that it is. Budgets are unlikely to return to the heady days of the 1980s, so I predict that innovative ways of bringing events, information or new technologies to customers will become more common. I hope to be telling you about more of them in the years to come.