Simplifying Science

NGP spoke with Greg Herrema, President of Scientific Instruments at Thermo Fisher Scientific about integration and innovation.

NGP. You’ve just completed your first year as Thermo Fisher Scientific. How has this integration changed your market offering?
GH. We have had a successful first year as Thermo Fisher Scientific. It has been a major undertaking to integrate such a diverse range of products and services, and presenting it to the ‘outside world’ as a seamless portfolio.

One of our goals during the integration has been to identify and deliver advanced technological and workflow solutions for our pharmaceutical customers. Whether involved in routine analysis or pushing the boundaries of scientific discovery, we want to add value by helping customers to improve speed, cost, compliance and quality in an industry that needs ever greater returns from investments in analytical technology.

NGP. One of your recent messages has concentrated on ‘simplifying technology’. What exactly do you mean by this in practice and how does this benefit the analytical scientist?
GH. The key to increasing utility of any technology is to make it more accessible to non-specialists. If we look at mass spectrometry (MS) as an example, the technique spread rapidly in a relatively short time frame when it became much easier to use. It moved MS from the realm of highly trained specialists in dedicated core facilities, to generalists conducting analyses in routine labs. Today, it is an established workhorse technology in the pharmaceutical development process, from research to routine.

The concept of taking advanced technology and making it more accessible to non-specialists drives much of our company-wide R&D focus. By making it easier for a broad range of end-users to have access to ever more sophisticated analytical technologies, we encourage innovation within our customer’s business.

NGP. Do you feel this approach sets you apart from other providers in the industry?
GH. It certainly places us at the forefront of an industry trend. By optimizing technical performance from sample preparation to reporting and by increasing access to complex technologies, we allow customers to spend more of their limited time and resource on meeting scientific and business goals.

NGP. ‘Innovation’ is a central aspiration for Thermo Fisher Scientific. How has this manifested itself in your recent product launches?
GH. Our philosophy in developing a new instrument is that it must deliver an innovative benefit relative to what is already on the market – either from us or from another manufacturer. The benefit can be in performance, speed, compliance, ease of use or cost of operation – and the decision is ultimately driven by our customers. Focus on innovation is a core value that we foster in our development teams and we are increasingly seeing the impact of that value in new products we are delivering. Two areas relevant to the pharmaceutical industry come immediately to mind: in molecular spectroscopy and mass spectrometry.

In molecular spectroscopy, we have just introduced a breakthrough line of new FTIR and Raman products. We leveraged the rugged, reliable architecture of our existing high-end spectroscopy portfolio and have delivered a new class of instruments that provides advanced capabilities for users who have neither the time nor expertise to become trained spectroscopists. We call this design approach “Spectroscopy Simplified.”

In the field of mass spectrometry, we are making advanced technology easier to use for our most sophisticated customers. We recently launched an enhanced LTQ Orbitrap, which can now be delivered with a new Electron Transfer Dissociation (ETD) option for highly sensitive post-translational modification work. A researcher can choose between three fragmentation options – ETD, CID (Collision Induced Dissociation) or HCD (High-Energy Collisional Dissociation) – for challenging proteomics work.

NGP. How well equipped are you to deal with/lead further changes within the analytical markets?
GH. The analytical market is dynamic and highly competitive, and continuous innovation will be vital to our long-term success. To remain a leader in the industry, we will need to be more focused than competitors in providing solutions that deliver tangible benefits. Essential to innovation will be ongoing consultancy with customers to understand what is needed, and in many cases learning from our customers’ use of our products to develop and deliver ever-greater capability to the market. Customer relationships are a critical source of input for product development, and keep us focused on the meeting the need for new technologies and applications. By making high-end technologies easier to use and improving laboratory workflows, we believe we can help our customers to maintain future growth for the pharmaceutical industry.

About the company
Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. is the world leader in serving science, enabling our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer. With annual revenues of $10 billion, they have more than 30,000 employees and serve over 350,000 customers within pharmaceutical and biotech companies, hospitals and clinical diagnostic labs, universities, research institutions and government agencies, as well as environmental and industrial process control settings.