IN THIS EDITION
2025 has come to an end, and, looking back, it’s clear quite quickly what a remarkable year this was for IonOpticks. It’s striking how much has changed in just 12 months. Two themes that stand out and define this year are recognition and reach. The formal acknowledgment of our work, through awards and industry recognition, validated what our community has known for years. Meanwhile, our team expanded across continents, bringing us closer to the researchers and partners we serve. As an eight-year-old company, we’re proud to see our impact extending further while staying true to the collaborative spirit that got us here.
Increasing our reach with a local presence
After hiring 13 new members in 2024, 2025 saw the addition of a whopping 30 new team members – more than double those of last year. From Production to HR, Engineering, Product Development, Customer Support, Procurement, Distribution, Events, Business Development, Finance, Operations, R&D, and Lab Managers and Technicians, our growing team lets us produce more columns, develop even better ones, and reach whole new kinds of customers with more responsive, local support as we continue to innovate and push the field forward.
What was new this year is that many of those new hires were international. Across the USA, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and the UK, team IO is becoming increasingly closer to our users. Further, it’s been invaluable to partner with 7 new distributors in 2025, with more slated for 2026. Fabrice, who joined IonOpticks as the APACI Distribution Channel Manager, made an instant impact: Across Taiwan, Japan, China, South Korea, Brazil, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia, our new distribution partners make our columns more accessible to researchers in different regions by placing stock locally, cutting lead times, and ensuring support is available in-region and in-language. These new partnerships build on our established partnerships in the US, Europe, and the UK and demonstrate the value of collaboration when it comes to growing access to elite tools.
Maintaining our culture and innovative spirit is crucial for us as we rapidly expand. One small, but vital way in which we did that this year was by defining our values, with input from every single member of the team, including our international hires, who joined us in April for our annual company retreat. To ensure that values don’t just remain words on a poster, we refined them over multiple weeks, brainstorming the small, daily actions we can undertake to bring our values to life every day. It’s exactly these values that have gotten us to where we are now – so capturing, distilling, and solidifying them will help us continue to drive what we do and how we do it, no matter where in the world.
Our retreat doubled as a great way to get to know each other, as we spent three days together making pizza, tasting wine, and collaborating over a scavenger hunt, to a stunning backdrop of the Yarra Valley in summer. Cross-country visits from our international people, a celebration of our eighth birthday, and further team events kept up the team bonding and made our new members feel welcome, culminating in our festive end-of-year celebration. That’s where we introduced a important new way of recognising our people: the IonOpticks Employee Awards. Following a round of peer nominations, we announced the winners, along with honourable mentions, for each of our core values.
Congratulations to everyone who won and was nominated. Seeing how you reacted demonstrated just what our values mean to us. Along with the fact that people from every department were nominated, it also reinforces that the values we set as a team reflect who we are. We deeply appreciate everyone’s decision to travel across the world to spend time with us at the retreat, at conferences, or for site visits in between. It’s great to have everyone under one roof. Our end-of-year celebration was a wonderful way to close out the year and celebrate all that we’ve achieved together.
Connecting people, not just products
It’s not just our own people that make us who we are – it’s you, our researchers, labs, partners, and early adopters. After we introduced our User Appreciation Events to say thank you in 2024, we continued this signature series with two new installments in 2025: an unforgettable closing cruise after ASMS 2025 in Baltimore and a stunning night at Arcadia Earth in Toronto around HUPO 2025. With cocktails, catering, and two outstanding hybrid DJ-saxophone sets from the world-class Tim Lacatena, we sincerely hope you enjoyed yourselves and felt our appreciation as much as we feel yours. 250 people at each gathering is truly remarkable.
Of course, one of the key draws of nights like these is the opportunity to meet other researchers. That shouldn’t be limited to a handful of times a year, which is why, in 2025, we hosted the very first of our ‘Peaks and Pints’ user networking event series at Belle Gueule brewery in downtown Montréal, and it proved to be a fantastic way to bring the local mass spec community together. We were pleased to see more attend than expected – both familiar and new – gathering to share their work, ideas, and experiences over some curated Canadian craft beers. The atmosphere was relaxed and open, and it naturally inspired conversations about ongoing projects, future plans, and opportunities to collaborate, especially among researchers working in the same region.
It set a warm tone for the events to follow, and we’re looking forward to scaling and hosting many more of these unique networking opportunities globally. Stay tuned for the announcement of our next location. In the meantime, thank you to everyone who attended and made these nights what they were. It’s incredible when you see so many people in a room together that our columns have impacted. We can’t wait to host more events like these around the world in 2026 and beyond.
Featured researchers
Thankfully, we don’t need to wait for events to get to know each other. As exciting and as potentially world-changing as every new discovery in proteomics can be, it’s people who make it all happen. Towards the end of 2024, we introduced our Community Spotlights as a way of illuminating the people behind the discoveries. In 2025, we got to know several researchers at various stages of their career and in various parts of the world: Dr. Mike Lanz, Dr. Patricia Skowronek, Dr. Samantha Emery-Corbin, Dr. Karl Krull, Dr. Lizhuo Ai, Dr. Xiang Zheng, Shelley Jager, Moe Haines, Dr. Bercin Cenik, and, since our last newsletter, Dr. Tim Veth, Dr. Mariya Mardamshina, and Teeradon Phlairaharn.
We can’t wait to connect with, and introduce you to, further researchers making a difference in 2026. We’d also love to get to know you better, so if you’d like to be a contributing author for an upcoming Community Newsletter, reach out to us via communications@ionoptickscopy.com and tell us a bit about yourself.
One of the perks of having a bigger team is that there are more and more ways to connect with you. We’ve been attending more conferences over the years, but 2025 is where it truly blew out of proportion. From established, large-scale events like ASMS and HUPO, to newer conferences like the third ever iSCMS, to specialised regional symposia, events, summer schools, and workshops, events have become a year-round way to bring like-minded researchers, industry partners, distributors, and students together. And from the dolomites to Okinawa, we got to do so in front of some truly spectacular backdrops.
Recognition and reach
Our community has known the importance of good chromatography for years. In 2025, however, the industry has increasingly come to recognise that, along with recognition through a multitude of awards.
Within months of their ASMS release, two of our new products were formally recognised. There was our expanded capillary flow column range, represented by the Aurora Ultimate 25×150 and Aurora Elite 15×150 columns, which were awarded a top spot by the Analytical Scientist in their Top 10 Innovations of 2025. This award recognises how we’re driving real-world impact in analytical science, delivering smart solutions that improve workflows, boost performance and offer meaningful new choices for our customers. It validates our innovation efforts and strengthens our position as a forward-looking, respected partner in the proteomics and chromatography space.
It was also an incredible honour for the HeatSync™ Controller to be selected for an International Good Design Award in the Product Design category. This prestigious award is a huge validation of our belief that great analytical tools deserve beautiful, intuitive supporting equipment. Well-considered design holds a vital place in contributing to the advancement of scientific research. Congratulations to everyone involved in designing, producing, and delivering this product and thank you to the Good Design Australia Jury for selecting it.
Our LinkedIn followers kept growing, as we recently celebrated our 8,000th follower with no end in sight. For the second year running, our Marketing team was a finalist in the Life Science Sales & Marketing (LSSM) Awards.
Awards aside, it’s the numbers that really show the impact that IonOpticks is making. At over 950 publications citing Aurora Series columns in 2025, that’s nearly double those in 2024, and inching closer towards the four-figure mark. Counting the PhD students and early-career researchers shaping the future of proteomics citing us in their theses and dissertations, we’ve already achieved 1,000 this year.
Whichever way you slice it, that’s more researchers than ever using our columns to aid their scientific breakthroughs. And that’s not even counting the many industry app notes and tech notes using IonOpticks’ products. That’s why we refreshed our Literature Room this year, giving you the ability to search the increasingly extensive user literature yourself, filtering by the techniques, products, and applications most relevant to you.
New releases
The two ASMS 2025 releases we touched on above were only a small part of a larger lineup. For one, years after we introduced Generation 3, 2025 was the year we introduced the 4th Generation of Aurora Series® columns to the world. Longevity and robustness are central to the design of Generation 4. As our new tech notes demonstrate, each column is built to withstand the high-pressure demands of long-term use while maintaining stable backpressure and uniform peak widths. The result is a column range that ensures sustained analytical precision, minimal performance drift, and greater longevity without compromising selectivity or resolution.
That coincided with the release of the HeatSync™ accessory range – comprising not just the award-winning controller, but the HeatSync™ Column Heater and HeatSync™ Rapid Column Housing, enabling temperature control for Aurora® Rapid 5 cm columns and bringing the benefits of temperature control to applications where it was previously unavailable, opening entirely new analytical possibilities.
As if one huge release wasn’t enough, IonOpticks took centre stage at HUPO 2025 in Toronto as well, with the release of NanoShield™, our first trap column. Designed to protect Aurora Series® columns without compromising sensitivity or depth of analysis, NanoShield™ products set a new standard for advanced proteomics workflows. See for yourself in the accompanying app note: across multiple LC-MS platforms, the NanoShield™ C18 trap column maintained direct injection-level performance. Across rapid (14-minute) and standard (~40 minute) gradients on Aurora® CSI and XT columns, the NanoShield™ maintained exceptional peak quality with minimal FWHM increases and substantially outperformed the competitor trap cartridge. Research Institute of Molecular Pathology’s early collaborator Dr Karl Mechtler recommends these trap columns himself. Shipping in early 2026, you can preorder them now.
Released at ASMS 2024, the Aurora Rapid 8×75 saw two dedicated application notes in 2025, demonstrating high sensitivity and throughput as well as exceptional column longevity and consistent performance across more than 4,000 injections. Increasing access to our products doesn’t stop at physical distribution. This year, we had the majority of our literature translated into Japanese and Simplified Chinese. Catch up on everything we’ve published in our Literature Room.
A look ahead to 2026
Our new releases don’t deliver real impact until they’re in researchers’ hands. And so, with NanoShield™ shipping in January, we look forward to seeing the impact they’ll help unlock for researchers around the world. It’s the researchers using our products that help advance human health, so we can’t wait to see more groundbreaking new publications that cite our columns.
2026 looks to be another year full of fresh product releases as we continue to grow our international reach. While we can’t say too much at this point, there’s a lot that we’re excited to share with you. And with another jam-packed event schedule, including whole new kinds of events, we’ll have plenty of opportunities to catch up with you and run you through what we’ve been working on.
While there’s a lot to look forward to, it’s just as important to stop, take a breath, and look back on everything we’ve accomplished in 2025. From record numbers to new starters, new products, and multiple awards, 2025 was a huge year. We created many new memories with our team and our users and have so much to be grateful for. Thank you to each and every one of you for making 2025 what it was for IonOpticks.