Column Chemistry: Chromatography's New Frontier

“Gone are the days where you might innovate around particle size or pore size alone.”

— Erin Chambers, Global Vice President & General Manager, Consumables & Lab Automation, Waters Corporation

As instrumentation vendors converge on similar hardware capabilities, Erin Chambers, global vice president and general manager of Waters Corporation's consumables and lab automation business, says the real competitive battleground in chromatography has shifted. Sensitivity, resolution, speed, and size remain must-have specifications on the hardware side, she says, and software is increasingly expected to interpret data rather than simply process it, but neither is what sets one system apart from another anymore. In her view, the deciding factor now sits inside the column, where precise chemistry can be matched to the needs of a specific molecule or class of molecules, turning a general-purpose system into an actual solution.

Chambers points to two recent Waters launches, a BioResolve column for peptides such as GLP-1s and other insulins, and a GTXResolve column for lipid nanoparticles, as evidence that chemistry and particle physics can be advanced together rather than separately. She calls that kind of dual breakthrough rare, since each discipline typically demands its own decades of specialized expertise in areas like pore size, base particle chemistry, and ligand design. Both columns, she says, were driven by the size of the target molecules and by subtle structural variations that impose distinct chemical requirements. The payoff, by her account: a GLP-1 impurity profile that once took roughly three hours can now be completed in under an hour. With an average cost of two billion dollars to bring a single drug to market, she frames that kind of time savings as consequential rather than incremental, with benefits she says can, in principle, flow through to lower development costs and broader access to therapies.

Chambers answered the following questions:

• You've described hardware and software as increasingly "table stakes" — can you walk me through what that shift looks like from where you sit, and why the column has become the new frontier of differentiation?
• With the launch of the BioResolve Peptide and GTxResolve Lipid Phenyl-Hexyl+ and C18+ columns, you have stated that Waters has made "simultaneous advances in both chemistry and particle physics." How rare is that kind of dual breakthrough, and what does it tell us about where column science is headed?

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