As someone managing 8 Varian instruments, I find the Agilent bashing to be
of minimal value or merit. I very much doubt the closure of the NMR
division will have any meaningful impact their sales in other markets. It
sure didn't matter to my counterpart in geochemistry, who was in the
market for a new ICP-MS. His response to the suggestion that Agilent's
reputation was tarnished was along the lines of "So I'm supposed to buy an
instrument I don't even want, and be stuck with it for years and years?
Hahahaha!" Then he bought one from Agilent.
In the small picture, I think if your NMR instrument is already a few
years old, you can likely manage it out to a normal lifespan by getting to
know some of the third party vendors in addition to Agilent. Some have
already been promoting their services in various forums. I wanted to
mention three that I haven't seen popping up that way, but I will endorse
based on recent positive experiences with them. I would be happy to
receive other people's positive recommendations also, as the survival of
high functioning third party vendors is in every Varian NMR owner's best
interest now. So my list is: for Varian probe repairs, JS Research. For
AMT Herley amplifier repairs: Broadband Power Technology. For refurbished
Varian autosamplers and repairs to them: Open Technologies or Kezeor
Technologies (they cooperate and share leads in order to keep travel costs
down). While looking into options for a busted amplifier, I also found
out that the AMT Herley amps are still being made though the company name
is now Kratos Lancaster. You can buy a plug and play replacement amp from
them and they told me they intend to keep manufacturing the Varian
compatible dual channel models.
In the bigger picture, though, there are a variety of factoids you can
interpret as meaning that the NMR market is not especially healthy, and
Agilent's decision to exit it is a symptom and not the cause.
Those of us of a certain age may remember Dan Aykroyd saying in
"Ghostbusters" (1984): "Personally, I liked the university. They gave us
money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never
been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've
*worked* in the private sector. They expect *results*." As someone who
has in fact never been out of college, I was very interested in a
presentation by Mark Dixon, now at Thermo Finnegan, previously at Varian
and Agilent, at the recent ACS meeting in San Francisco. Mark was of
course there to talk about Thermo's benchtop NMR instruments, but he gave
an overview of the NMR business as a whole. Mark shared his slides with
me afterwards, and I expect he would share them with others or perhaps
AMMRL as a whole. Among the interesting data in Mark's presentation were
that global annual NMR sales, at least in 2010, in the range of $300-$400
million. That sounds like a lot to someone who's never been out of
college, until you compare it with the global MRI market, which is more
like $4 billion, and mass spec, which is even larger. Some Google
searching reveals there are 20+ companies in the mass spec market, with 5
big players, and the biggest holds about 20% market share. If you saw
"Ghostbusters" in the theater when it first came out, maybe you remember
GE NMR and IBM Instruments being in the NMR business, when there were 5
vendors in the mix.
Those of us in academia will recognize that Mark Dixon's baseline year of
2010 was a year when the federal stimulus money tap was still open, and
instrumentation grants are less plentiful now. The expected slow sales
that the C&EN article mentions are probably part of Agilent's timing for
exiting and no other instrument companies (e.g. Thermo) stepping in to buy
the Agilent NMR business or launch their own high field NMR product line.
Looking at NSF MRI award data for 2008-2014, NSF made 634 instrumentation
awards. By my count, just 19 were for buying (grant titles starting with
"Acquisition of") a commercial NMR. These totaled about $7.45 million in
NSF funds. I would guess from looking at institutions getting an award
that half of these were to universities getting their first
superconducting instrument, and about half a dozen max went to places
where there is a pre-existing NMR facility with a permanent staff
scientist. 11 of the 19 were for 400s. NSF doesn't allow you to search
applications that weren't funded, and I don't think they have any idea
about the number and type of instrumentation pre-proposals that
universities receive and reject when they have internal competitions for
the two MRI proposals that can be submitted annually for instrument
acquisition. My guess would be that "we have x NMR spectrometers, but
want x+1" proposals have lower than average success rates both internally
and externally.
In the last five years, NIH made 484 instrumentation grants, starting with
the grant number S10. "Conventional" NMR (I excluded DNP systems in my
count) did a little better here, 25 of the awards totalling $17.25
million. Since these awards go to places with sizable concentrations of
people with NIH R01s, these awards are going to skew in the direction of
larger universities and the instruments are pretty likely to be in
established core facilities. But the sum total of NMR spectrometers
funded by NSF and NIH together is, in my opinion, well below replacement
level for just treading water in many core facilities.
In the past, there have been some AMMRL threads on the theme of "what are
you doing about this at your place?" I am curious enough to ask everybody
a few questions about how they are funding their instrument acquisitions,
how the rate of acquisition compares with what it would take to tread
water, and the overall viability of NMR core facilities. This is entirely
curiosity driven, geared toward academia, and there are no prizes for
filling it out. However I will summarize the responses.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QF2KHT9
David VanderVelde
Manager, High Resolution NMR Facility, Caltech
davidv_at_caltech.edu
Received on Thu Dec 18 2014 - 13:28:14 MST