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PANIC 2018: Making NMR More Accessible and Managing the Knowledge We Collect

March 19, 2018
by Jessica Litman, Marketing Communications Specialist, ACD/Labs

Do you ever look back at retro versions of modern day technology to see how far we’ve come in terms of development?
NMR MagnetLately I’ve been doing a lot of that. As we wind down from PANIC and ramp up for ENC, I’ve been considering both our progress in NMR software capabilities and how much potential is still out there. At PANIC (Practical Applications of NMR in Industry Conference), which took place in La Jolla, California this year, NMR instrumentation was discussed in a similar context. Since its invention in the late 1940’s, NMR has become a robust analytical technique with improved spectral sensitivity, resolution, and acquisition methods. That being said, in the last decade NMR has taken a large step towards becoming a more accessible technique as benchtop NMR spectrometers are developed further. This was one of the main topics addressed at PANIC 2018. More specifically, how the NMR industry can put more effort into promoting NMR as an accessible and readily available technique for analytical and process chemists.

Kim Colson from Bruker set the stage for this conversation with her presentation “Moving NMR out of the basement”, that is, making it less exclusive to the NMR community and less intimidating to analytical chemists. Kim et al.’s endeavor is insightful. This is because educating chemists on the range of NMR instrumentation available and implementing NMR as a standard technique in QA/QC workflows will contribute to producing safer and more consistent chemical compounds and mixtures.  However, more measurements mean more data to be analyzed and stored, which is an industry-wide pain point.

ReportsThis topic was addressed at our NMR Software User’s Meeting by Amber Balazs from AstraZeneca. Amber showed her workflow in biopharmaceutical discovery, which uses the ACD/Spectrus Platform, for storing data, analyzing it, and then putting the knowledge gained to good use. PANIC reaffirmed that with innovation comes a drive for knowledge management. That way scientists can store, access, and get the most understanding from their research. At ACD/Labs, we recognize the cost of stress and time from lost data, which is why knowledge management is one of our top priorities.

Finally, PANIC explored the many ways applied NMR is being used in practical day-to-day applications. This included sessions that discussed how NMR is applied to food analysis (safety, quality and authenticity), the pharmaceutical industry (discovery, design, manufacturing and fingerprinting), polymers and the oil industry, and process monitoring. It also covered the rapidly evolving field of qNMR, and there was an eye-opening session on the use of NMR techniques for National Security. PANIC concluded with a very nice workshop on Non-Uniform sampling and a session on solid-state NMR and DNP.

Next year, PANIC will be on the East Coast at Hilton Head Island. Based on the legacy of PANIC 2018 we are already looking forward to that meeting.

If you (quite reasonably) can’t wait until then, ACD/Labs will be at the ENC (Experimental NMR Conference) in Orlando at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress from April 29th to May 4th this year. We hope that you’ll stop by and let us show you how our Spectrus Platform can help you simplify your spectral processing and data management. Find us at the Magnolia B hospitality suite, we look forward to seeing you there.


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