Laboratory equipment

Restek Corporation used its Pittcon 2026 appearance to showcase the RMX line of GC columns, the company’s first new column family in years. The new line is built around a proprietary deactivation chemistry called TriMax. The flagship product, the RMX-5Sil MS, ships in 17 SKUs across four column formats. Those include integrated guard column and…

Xylem Lab Solutions, a division of Xylem Inc., used its Pittcon 2026 press briefing to showcase how its latest products can help clients do more with less. “Labs are being asked to do more: more parameters, more data, more compliance. And they’re being asked to do that with less experience, less space and less capital,”…

Waters unveiled the ARES-G3 Rheometer at the Pittcon 2026 Conference in San Antonio today. The company is positioning the instrument as a step change in materials characterization speed and data density. Built under the company’s TA Instruments brand, the system captures up to 25,000 data points per second: 10 times the rate of its predecessor,…

Shimadzu Scientific Instruments used Pittcon 2026 to showcase the TOC-1000e S, an on-line total organic carbon (TOC) analyzer built for ultrapure water (UPW) monitoring in semiconductor fabrication. In this market segment, even sub-microgram contamination can cascade directly into wafer defects and yield loss, according to Haihan Chen, Shimadzu’s product manager for elemental spectroscopy, who presented…

Systec GmbH & Co. KG introduced the next generation of its compact and mid-sized laboratory autoclaves at Pittcon 2026, with the new DX-Series (horizontal benchtop) and VX-Series (vertical floor-standing) replacing the company’s previous lines. Both series are built on the architecture of Systec’s larger HX-Series and feature a fully redeveloped touchscreen control system, new process…

Waters TA Instruments unveiled the ARES-G3 Rheometer at Pittcon 2026 in San Antonio, the next generation of its flagship rheometer platform. The ARES-G3 captures up to 25,000 data points per second, 10x the rate of the predecessor ARES-G2, and reportedly cuts standard testing times by up to 80% through fully integrated Fast Frequency Chirps, which…

In just a few quarters, Thermo Fisher launched the DXR3 SmartRaman+ for at-line QC and the TruScan G3 for handheld raw-material identification, Bruker acquired Tornado Spectral Systems to deepen its process Raman lineup, Endress+Hauser continued the renaming of the Kaiser Raman portfolio, Metrohm expanded its 1064 nm handheld range with the NanoRam-1064 for pharma raw-material…

Thermo Fisher Scientific has introduced the Thermo Scientific DXR3 SmartRaman+ Raman Spectrometer, positioning it as an at-line quality control (QC) tool for pharmaceutical and industrial manufacturing environments. Thermo Fisher Scientific says the system is built to support non-destructive Raman measurements directly through commonly used product containers and finished packaging, aiming to reduce the need for…

Thermo Fisher Scientific has introduced two chromogenic culture media products designed to help clinical laboratories more quickly detect and differentiate clinically significant Candida species, including the multidrug-resistant pathogen Candida auris. The newly launched Thermo Scientific Brilliance Candida 2 Agar and Thermo Scientific Spectra Candida Agar allow laboratories to visually distinguish among several Candida species through…

The CM1950 Cryostat with DualEcoTec Cooling System targets histology lab bottlenecks with sharply improved thermal performance and a near-zero GWP refrigerant. Leica Biosystems, a Danaher company, announced the global launch (Feb. 11, 2026) of the Leica CM1950 Cryostat with DualEcoTec Cooling System. Leica is positioning the unit as a response to common histology workflow friction…

Shimadzu Scientific Instruments has introduced the Nexera ion chromatograph (IC), a compact, fully automated system designed to streamline routine and regulated water quality testing. Engineered for consistency and ease of use, the system aims to reduce manual effort while delivering reliable analytical performance for operators of all experience levels. The Nexera IC has a compact…

Ginkgo Bioworks started in a Cambridge apartment in 2008. Five MIT scientists: Shetty, Jason Kelly, Barry Canton, Austin Che and their adviser Tom Knight, set out to make biology easier to engineer. Tom Knight, originally trained in computer science and engineering, shifted into biology before co-founding Ginkgo Bioworks with four MIT colleagues. The team’s founding…

The initial reaction across IP-sensitive industries was to slam the door. In early 2024, a ZoomRx survey found that 65% of the top 20 Big Pharmas had banned employees from using ChatGPT, largely relating to concerns that sensitive internal data could be leaked to competitors. That same year, some 83% of life sciences professionals surveyed…

Beyond the headline platform launches at SLAS 2026, a quieter wave of partnerships, reagent kits, and niche hardware targeted the unglamorous bottlenecks that slow drug discovery and lab operations. If you missed the bigger moves, see our coverage of the lab OS wars, ABB’s GoFa cobot lab workflows, Biosero’s GoSimple workcells and Green Button Go…

Biosero, part of the BICO Group and a provider of lab automation software and integration services, brought two announcements to SLAS 2026: a standardized workcell product line called GoSimple, and an assistive AI layer for its Green Button Go scheduling software. GoSimple is a pre-configured, automation-ready benchtop workcell designed to cut deployment time for common…

Cenevo, the Battery Ventures–backed lab software company formed last July from the merger of Titian Software and Labguru, announced two AI agents at SLAS 2026 aimed at reducing manual overhead in lab operations. The first, an AI Protocol Conversion agent, transforms paper-based or static document protocols into structured, reusable formats within Labguru’s ELN/LIMS platform. It…

Atinary this week announced the launch of its new AI-powered laboratory in Boston, MA. The new lab will enable faster, more reliable discovery across chemistry, materials and pharmaceutical R&D. By moving beyond software into the physical execution of science, the facility is designed to catalyze faster, more reliable breakthroughs in chemistry, materials science and pharmaceuticals.…

As life science laboratories face escalating pressure to accelerate drug discovery while maintaining rigorous data integrity, the “manual bottleneck”—the human intervention required between high-tech instruments—remains a primary hurdle. To address this, Molecular Devices, a Danaher Corporation company, has announced a strategic collaboration with London-based Automata to create a truly interconnected research ecosystem. Molecular Devices’ imaging…

After teasing it late last year, QIAGEN displayed the QIAsprint Connect at SLAS 2026 in Boston, marking the company’s entry into high-throughput benchtop sample-prep automation for research labs. The system processes up to 192 samples per run with minimal manual intervention and fits a compact benchtop footprint. The platform supports both QIAGEN-tested and fully customizable…

London-based Automata, a SLAS exhibitor, has closed a $45 million Series C round led by Dimension, with participation from Danaher Ventures and a strategic investment partnership with Danaher Corporation. The funding will accelerate deployment of the company’s LINQ lab automation platform, which combines modular robotics with orchestration software designed to make wet labs programmable and…

At SLAS 2026, three orchestration platforms launched in the same week, multiple instruments shipped with API-first positioning, and two vendors debuted competing target engagement assays head-to-head. The closed-loop lab is now a procurement fight. On February 5, Ginkgo Bioworks and OpenAI announced that GPT-5 had autonomously designed and iterated a large cell-free protein synthesis campaign…

Waters Corp. (NYSE: WAT) completed its roughly $18.8 billion combination with BD’s Biosciences & Diagnostic Solutions businesses on Feb. 9, 2026—and promptly watched its stock fall as much as 12% intraday to $335.86, recovering slightly to around $343 by midday. The selloff wasn’t about the deal structure or the standalone Waters results, both of which…

Waters Corp. (NYSE: WAT) said Feb. 9, 2026 that it has completed its combination with BD’s Biosciences & Diagnostic Solutions businesses, completing a tax-efficient Reverse Morris Trust transaction first announced in July 2025 and widely described as a roughly $17.5B deal. With the close, legacy Waters shareholders own about 60.8% of the combined company (fully…

A collaboration between Ginkgo Bioworks and OpenAI has produced what may one of the most concrete demonstrations yet of AI-driven autonomous science: a closed-loop system in which OpenAI’s GPT-5 designed, executed, analyzed and iteratively refined 36,000 cell-free protein synthesis experiments over six months, with minimal human intervention. The system reduced the cost of producing superfolder…

Check out our red carpet interview from the R&D 100 Awards below, where Derek Sokolowski, Product Manager Cell Culture at PHC Corp. of North America, shared the team’s excitement about their win and the science behind it. PHC’s winning product, LiCellMo, a live cell metabolic pathway analyzer, has a core focus: giving researchers continuous, non-disruptive…