Waters acquires MOBILion Systems for bringing advanced ion-mobility separation to mass spectrometry portfolio

Waters Corporation, a global life sciences and diagnostics leader, has acquired MOBILion Systems, Inc., the pioneer of SLIM high-resolution ion mobility separationtechnology for complex molecular analysis. The acquisition broadens Waters' entry into the proteomics market, pairing SLIM's separation power with Waters' Xevo™ MRT MS speed and resolution enabling superior bottom-up analysis of complex proteomes versus LC-MSalone.

This acquisition accelerates Waters' strategy to enter and drive innovation in the attractive proteomics market, where LCMS proteomics is a $2 billion Total Addressable Market (TAM), growing at a high single-digit rate.

MOBILion's SLIM (Structures for Lossless Ion Manipulations) technology provides high-resolution ion mobility separation, resolving molecular differencesthat are difficult to distinguish by liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry alone. 

Using the Xevo TQ Absolute XR tandem quadrupole Mass Spectrometer, which offers industry-leading sensitivity and robustness, the acquisition creates a path from biomarker discovery to targeted biomarker verification and validation in clinical trial cohorts on a single platform as workflows in the waters_connect Platform support method transfer from discovery into development.

SLIM enabled technology will drive insights supporting large cohort studies and high-throughput generation of high-quality data required by foundationand frontier AI models.