Cape Cod Business, PID Analyzers, Wins Prestigious R&D 100 Award for Arsenic in Water and Food Analyzer

Osterville, Cape Cod Photo by J.L. Maclachlan

It's been an exciting summer here on Cape Cod! 

Post updated 11/19/2013

After taking the stage, with award in hand 

I am delighted to announce that our small Cape Cod based business,  PID Analyzers, LLC, has been selected as a 2013 recipient of the prestigious Research and Development (R and D) 100 Award for the development of our Model 33 arsenic in water  and food analyzer in the laboratory equipment category. The "R and D 100 Awards recognize the 100 most technologically significant products introduced into the marketplace over the past year" according to the press release issued by Research and Development  Magazine. In addition to our business receiving this honor,  my father and business partner, Jack Driscoll, as the developer of the winning product, received  special recognition at the awards ceremony on November 7, 2013 in Orlando, FL.  

Here is a full list of the 2013 winners. Note that this is a really big deal to win an R and D 100 award and that our small, privately-held Cape Cod business competed against publicly traded companies as well as National Laboratories. These are a few of the *household names* on the winners list: General Motors, Dow Chemical and Olympus. Note that we had the opportunity to participate in the R and D 100 Awards Industry Roundtable on the morning of the awards banquet. Read more about that including participants here.

 As a remarkable  followup to our R and D  100Award announcement the FDA announced  that they are that they are proposing a decrease in the  action level for arsenic in apple juice from 23 parts per billion (ppb) to 10 ppb and the PID Analyzers’  R& D Award winning Arsenic in Food and Water analyzer can detect arsenic down to 100 ppt or 1% of the standard!

Cape Cod Times Columnist Sean Gonsalves featured my father, Jack Driscoll and his work as a chemist in his July 23, 2013 column dubbing him "A real-life superhero". Sean did such a marvelous job in his portrayal of my father so much so that you can even hear my father's enthusiastic Boston accent throughout the piece. 

We've gotten to know Sean over the past couple years since he has taken an interest in our scientific outreach to our local community via the Cape Cod Science Cafe. 

When we shared the link to the column on our company Facebook page, we received nearly 1,600 likes and more than 100,000 people had seen the post.

My father had dozens of offers to send him a *superhero* cape. Nearly twenty people remarked on what a skilled writer Sean Gonsalves is. A week after the column was published, one of our vendors stopped into our place wanting to shake hands with a real life superhero. His wife had seen the article in the paper and said to her husband "don't you know  this guy"?

The ultimate was this letter of congratulations from Governor Patrick.

Chemical and Engineering News, a trade publication with a circulation of 164,000 chemists,  ran a feature article in their May 6, 2013 issue titled "Eating Arsenic" about the  Arsenic Contamination in Food and Water  two day symposium at the American Chemical Society Spring National Meeting on the Agricultural Food Chemistry Division track that I organized along with scientists from  FDA and USDA. There were more than 40 papers and ours was one of 9 selected to be in the article as well as featured in the onsite press conference. 

Thanks to my friend, David Still, II, my new friends at our local newspaper, The Barnstable Patriot, did a nice story on us when we got back from the Spring National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans. Here is a link to "Father-Daughter Team Find Good Chemistry".

Photo by J. Maclachlan

We ran this press release on August 21, 2013 via Business Wire In under two hours it had been picked up by the following:

Yahoo Finance UK/Ireland

Yahoo Finance Singapore

Yahoo Finance India

Reuters

Wall Street Journal's Market Watch

As well as a dozen others.

Below is an embedded link to the award winning product brochure which describes our arsenic in water and food analyzer in greater detail. The Model 33 Arsenic in Water and Food Analyzer technology is based on hydride generation (reduction) followed by the separation of inorganic and organic hydrides by gas chromatography and detection by the classical photoionization technique developed by PID Analyzers, LLC. This method can detect inorganic arsenic down to 100 parts per trillion (ppt) and is a tenth of the cost of the current instrumentation technique: inductively coupled plasma/mass spectrometry (ICP/MS). 

  Award winning analyzer for the analysis of arsenic in food and water by Jennifer Maclachlan