Herbert Hill
Herbert Hill

Excellims Corporation (Excellims), a leading provider of high performance ion mobility spectrometers (HPIMS), announced that the company has entered into an exclusive worldwide license agreement with Washington State University for a new instrumental method to interface an Ambient Pressure Ion Mobility Spectrometer (APIMS) to a Mass Spectrometer (MS). This new agreement is an expansion of an existing patent licensing agreement between Excellims and WSU. Developed in the laboratory of Dr. Herbert H. Hill Jr., a Regents Professor of chemistry at WSU who has been a leading researcher in the IMS field for 45 years, the new technology will significantly improve the ion transmission into the MS, potentially overcoming sensitivity challenges when interfacing APIMS to MS.

Brian Clowers, chemistry
Brian Clowers

In 2014, Excellims introduced its MA3100 product line combining HPIMS technology with a dual gate APIMS-MS approach developed by Dr. Brian Clowers in Dr. Hill’s lab (US Patent 7,560,688). Excellims’ HPIMS can offer outstanding ion mobility resolution in a compact instrument size; with the dual gate approach, the user can maximize ion selection flexibility based on ion mobilities, allowing only those ions of interest into the MS. This new patent from Dr. Hill’s lab will significantly boost the performance of Excellims’ HPIMS-MS products and make the HPIMS-MS more amenable for complex samples with low-abundance compounds of interest. This additional intellectual property from Washington State University also expands the Company’s already comprehensive patent portfolio that includes over 50 US and international patents relating to IMS and MS instrumentation.

“We are very glad to continuously work with Dr. Hill’s lab to further advance IMS instrumentation. This new approach will enable APIMS to interface to MS systems that were challenged with scan speed and sensitivity. With much greater ion transmission from this brilliant new approach, we can effectively complete ion mobility mass data acquisition for fast eluting HPLC peaks”, explained Dr. Ching Wu, President and CEO of Excellims Corporation. “I am very happy to see our research achievements being implemented into a commercial instrument; it will allow researchers in a variety of academic research and industrial research fields to have a more powerful tool based on ion mobility spectrometry” Dr. Hill commented. “With this advancement of the ion mobility technology, many analyses that could not be accomplished by state-of-the-art HPLC or MS can become reality, especially when a high resolution ion mobility device like the Excellims’ spectrometer is used.”

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