IN THIS EDITION

2024 has come to an end, and with it, another huge year for IonOpticks. We know it’s cliché to say, but it’s seriously hard to believe that everything we’re about to look back on happened in just these last 12 months. If there are any common themes among these events, it’s growth and collaboration. As a seven-year-old company, it’s no surprise that we’re growing. But as this review will go to show, this is truly the year in which that growth accelerated and took off like a rocket ship. And none of that growth would have happened without collaborating with each other, with researchers, and with partners.

Bigger & better

In response to growing demand, #teamIO continued to grow across all areas of the business. In 2024 alone, we hired 13 new members. That’s nearly half the team! From Production Assistants to Team Admins, Marketing, Quality Assurance, R&D, and Customer Experience, we strengthened core areas while building whole new capabilities for us. These new faces gear us up for the future and let us further improve the quality and reliability of our products and our customer service.

Reflecting our huge team growth, a significant part of the year was spent preparing for the move into our new HQ. With all of our equipment moved across, several weeks spent working there and enjoying the bigger space, and even a festive, end-of-year celebration, it truly feels like a new home. As nice as the bigger space is for everyone, the most important change is to have our team all under one roof.

But it wouldn’t be a team without some quality bonding. And with more and more people onboard, we’ve had to get rather creative with our teambuilding activities this year. From painting to pottery to community gardening, we made art, helped preserve a local park, and, most importantly, got to know each other better along the way.

It was also great to have Dr. Peter Wrighton-Smith, IonOpticks Chairman, and Board Director Mårten Winge, over at our new HQ in December (there’s a lot that’s new). Their visit was a special opportunity to see our bespoke manufacturing facility up close and connect with the team behind the production of Aurora Series. Over two days, Peter and Mårten shared meals with our staff, taking the time to get to know the people and stories that make IonOpticks what it is. We deeply appreciate their decision to travel across the world to be here with us before the holiday break—it was a wonderful way to close out the year and their support for our vision and growth was felt by everyone.

Getting to know you better

We also got to know many of you, our researchers, labs, partners, and early adopters, a lot better in 2024, thanks to our User Appreciation Events. After seven years of you welcoming us into your labs, providing feedback, and making us who we are today, we felt it was our turn to give back, returning the endless hospitality you’ve shown us. It all started in June, with a magical evening at The Fifth’s rooftop restaurant and bar, during ASMS. At IMSC, we doubled our capacity to extend our appreciation to more of you that deserve it. That resulted in an unforgettable night at SEA LIFE Melbourne Aquarium, with Jesper Olsen joining us as a guest speaker. Finally, during HUPO in Dresden, we celebrated our 7-year anniversary with you.

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. If you missed out so far, don’t worry – we’ll be organising many more events like these throughout 2025 and beyond.

Thankfully, there are also other ways to get to know each other between events. Such as our brand new Community Newsletter. The constant and ever-accelerating discoveries made in proteomics are incredible. So are the people behind those discoveries. That’s why we’re featuring researchers in our new series. So far, we’ve featured Andreas Metousis, Manuel Matzinger and Pierre Sabatier, with several more coming soon. We’d 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 [email protected] and tell us a bit about yourself.

The rapid growth of proteomics has opened up many new conferences – and with a bigger team, we were able to attend more of them than ever. There were the classic big ones: ASMS, HUPO, and IMSC, which just so happened to be in our hometown of Melbourne, letting us have our biggest conference attendance yet. Then there were the more recently established conferences, including the 7th Single Cell Proteomics Conference, the 5th European Symposium on Single Cell Proteomics, and the second ever iSCMS. From Copenhagen to Dresden, Anaheim, and Vienna, we got to connect with people in so many stunning parts of the world.

Making waves

If our user events weren’t enough, we felt appreciated in many other ways this year. In July, we reached our 5,000th LinkedIn follower. With over 6,250 now, in December, that doesn’t look like it’s slowing down any time soon. Is it any wonder that, in November, our Marketing team was a finalist in the Life Science Sales & Marketing (LSSM) Awards for 2024?

It’s mad to think that wasn’t the only award IonOpticks was nominated for this year. In April, IonOpticks was named one of Australia’s Top 50 Most Innovative Manufacturers for 2024, being awarded as a Silver Winner in @AuManufacturing’s prestigious annual awards breakfast in Sydney.

Awards aside, it’s the numbers that really show the impact that IonOpticks is making. With over 530 publications citing Aurora Series columns in their methods section in 2024, that’s more researchers than ever using our columns to aid their scientific breakthroughs. And that’s not even counting the many app notes and tech notes using Aurora Series columns.

New releases

Our inaugural User Appreciation Event wasn’t the only thing that made a splash at this year’s ASMS in Anaheim, California. At the conference, we unveiled our latest products, the Aurora Rapid 8 cm x 75 µm and the Aurora Rapid 8 cm x 150 µm. Research Institute of Molecular Pathology’s early collaborator Karl Mechtler said “the Aurora Rapid 8×75 will certainly become the new standard in chromatography for single-cell proteomics research.” In his keynote ‘Challenging the Astral mass analyzer’, Karl showed us that he identified over 5,300 proteins per cell at unseenSimilarly, Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry’s Johannes Müller-Reif delivered an incredible showcase of the Aurora Rapid 8 cm x 150 µm, analyzing 45,000 plasma samples to examine the phenotypic characteristics of adverse pregnancy outcomes.

Our own application note for the Rapid 8×150 looked similarly promising. We were able to identify more than 9,300 proteins and 100,000 unique peptides from 200ng of sample, all with remarkably stable retention times.

We published several other application and tech notes in 2024, featuring a variety of our other columns used in conjunction with different mass specs. Whether you use a ZenoTOF 7600, an Orbitrap Exploris 480, or a Q-Exactive, we likely published an app note this year that demonstrates how to get the most out of your mass spec. Catch up on everything we’ve published over at our Resource Hub.

The power of partnerships

Collaboration was a hugely important theme for us in 2024. Though, to be fair, when is collaboration not important? After all, the biggest scientific breakthroughs are made possible through teamwork. Other than individual collaborators with whom we worked on the application notes, we formalised some big partnerships this year.

In September, we partnered with Adelis Equity Partners, a Nordic private equity firm renowned for partnering with and accelerating the growth of companies in their focus sectors including healthcare and life sciences. With Adelis joining the IonOpticks team, we also welcomed several industry heavyweights to the board. Want to get to know our new Board of Directors better? Read all about Peter, Mårten, Sibel, and Rasmus here.

In October, we announced a collaboration agreement with SCIEX, a global leader in life science analytical technologies, to co-market the Aurora Series XS range with the ZenoTOF line, including the latest ZenoTOF 7600+ system. The Aurora Series XS range has the unique design to optimise peptide and protein analysis on the ZenoTOF line, enabling researchers to unlock a new level of sensitivity.

And finally, in December we announced a long-term supply agreement with Biognosys, a global leader in MS-based proteomics contract research services. Under the agreement, IonOpticks will supply Biognosys with custom chromatography columns to support the standardisation of its research services platforms and enable deeper, reproducible proteome profiling. Consistent with our dedication to high-quality, tailored solutions, the custom column integrates seamlessly into Biognosys’ workflows, addressing the company’s unwavering criteria for chromatography that maximises sensitivity, depth of coverage and reproducibility in the context of their broader platform.