Archive
32 articles published. Sorted newest first.
Specialty chemicals dealmaking through May 2026 leans on carve-outs and bolt-ons rather than transformative consolidation - BASF Coatings to Carlyle, an amended Honeywell-Johnson Matthey deal, Element Solutions on EFC.
Bruker reported $823.4 million in Q1 2026 revenue, up 2.7% on a 4.5% FX tailwind, but organic growth was negative 4.4% even as BSI bookings rose at a high-single-digit pace for a third straight quarter.
Agilent reported $1.80 billion in first-quarter fiscal 2026 revenue, up 7.0% reported and 4.4% on a core basis, with all three operating segments growing ahead of the May 27 second-quarter release.
Thermo Fisher's Analytical Instruments segment posted $1.72 billion in Q1 2026 revenue, flat year-on-year, with a 2% organic decline tied to softer academic and government demand.
March-May 2026 in ACS Analytical Chemistry: three threads for process analytics - close-focus Raman probes for turbid streams, deep-learning chemometrics, and open-source spectroscopy tooling.
BASF, Dow, and LyondellBasell all reported Q1 2026 results that point to tight capex, footprint rationalisation, and cost programmes - shifting process-analytics demand toward brownfield retrofits, not greenfield builds.
FDA finalized the Advanced Manufacturing Technologies designation program in January 2025. The older Emerging Technology Program handles earlier engagement; its guidance refresh is due by end-2026 under PDUFA VII.
Mettler-Toledo reported $947.1 million in Q1 2026 sales, with management calling out process analytics as small but fast-growing on semiconductor fab build-outs, data-center cooling, and bioprocessing demand.
Twenty years after the first FDA continuous manufacturing approval, the technology is no longer experimental - but adoption is uneven, and the bottlenecks are now organizational, not technical.
SERS makes Raman a billion times stronger and a hundred times more fragile. For most inline measurements that is the wrong trade. The places where it pays off are narrow but real.
A primer on PAT - the FDA-driven framework for measuring chemistry where it happens, why pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturers adopt it, and the tools that make it practical.
Six recent reviews map where hyperspectral imaging now sits as a process-analytics tool in pharma, food, recycling, and beyond - and where chemometrics, data hunger, and standards still hold it back.
Nine vendors, one technique. Where the differences actually matter - multi-channel architecture, probe ruggedization, software ecosystem, and regulatory track record - and how we evaluated them.
analytica 2026 closed in Munich with 35,000 visitors and 1,135 exhibitors. AI and automation drew the loudest applause; the process analytics floor was quieter than the lab side.
Twenty years of guidance documents - 2004 FDA PAT guidance, ICH Q8 through Q14, ASTM E2363 - turned a fragmented vocabulary into a working framework. A reading guide.
USP chapters 858 (Raman Spectroscopy) and informational 1858 replaced chapter 1120 on 1 August 2020. Almost six years on, handheld identity testing is the workhorse application; compendial method adoption is uneven.
ICH Q14 reached Step 4 in November 2023. Thirty months on, the EU, FDA, Swissmedic and China NMPA have it on the books, but the ISPE readiness survey shows enhanced-approach adoption sitting at 19%.
Five recent papers sketch where deep-learning chemometrics sits versus PLS for process Raman: a public bioprocess benchmark, two classifier benchmarks, self-supervised pre-training, and an explainability tool for GMP.
Both techniques measure chemical composition without sampling. The choice is rarely close once you map your process onto five questions: water, fluorescence, specificity, dynamic range, and probe access.
scikit-learn, pyChemometrics, ChemometricsLib, and the rest. A practitioner's review of what works for inline spectroscopy, what doesn't, and where the gaps still are.
Recent peer-reviewed work on time-gated Raman - 512-pixel SPAD line arrays, Fourier-transform variants, and time-resolved use beyond fluorescence rejection - and what process-analytics teams can take from it.
A feasibility study costs less than the analyzer and reduces project risk by an order of magnitude. The shape of a useful one - what to measure, on what samples, against what reference, with what success criteria.
A scan of vendor press rooms over the March-May 2026 window turns up no new process Raman analyzers from the major suppliers. The visible motion was in adjacent inline analytics and lab-grade Raman.
Eight vendors, one technique. Where inline NIR differs by interferometer architecture, fiber-optic probe, sampling speed, and chemometric ecosystem - and how we screened the field.
Spectra are not answers. The bridge between a 1,000-channel spectrum and a number you can act on is chemometrics - a small toolbox of multivariate methods, used the same way for forty years.
Updated spec sheets through late 2025 consolidate Endress+Hauser's Raman Rxn-10, -20, -30, -40 and -46 probes under one naming scheme, with the bioprocess Rxn-46 keyed to Sartorius BioPAT Spectro.
A composite of conversations with engineers running multi-site PAT programs. The technical work is straightforward; the parts that go wrong are organizational, contractual, and cultural.
Both methods take a 1,000-channel spectrum and compress it into a handful of latent variables. They are not interchangeable. PCA describes; PLS predicts. The decision is older than most of the software.
ICH Q14 sets the framework. ASTM E1655 sets the practice. The intersection - what an inspector actually wants to see in a chemometric validation file - is a short, specific list.
A user requirement specification is the contract between the process owner and everyone else. Done well it shrinks the project; done badly it bloats it. The structure that survives audit and procurement.
A composite of observations from PAT projects where the model team and the line team had everything they needed except a shared vocabulary. What both sides actually mean by the words they use.
A composite of observations from practitioners who have worked PAT projects on both pharmaceutical and bulk-chemicals sites. The instrument is often the same; almost everything around it is different.