Your 2021 chromatography and rotary evaporation crystal ball

Happy New Year everybody! It’s my first post from my retirement burrow. Although I’d like to go into deep winter sleep, I am also enjoying staying in touch with chromatography and rotary evaporation and you. It’s also the first post for 2021 and this time I want to stick to tradition and make it a prediction post. So, sit back and enjoy me trying to play fortune teller for what is coming up for flash chromatography, preparative chromatography and distillation in 2021.

I am not much of a believer in fortune tellers and horoscopes and what not, but have you ever heard of Paul the Octopus? This fellow, living the good life in a Sea Life Center in Germany, was tasked with predicting the winners of the Germany national soccer team. His caretakers would offer him two boxes containing food. The boxes were the same, except for they were decorated with the different flags of the teams that were competing in the upcoming soccer game. Whichever box Paul chose to eat from was considered his prediction as the winner.

He went 7-0 for the German matches in the 2010 World Cup and correctly chose Spain as the winner. Overall, he had a record of 12 correct predictions out of 14 for a success rate of about 86%!

I don’t have Paul the Oracle Octopus here to tell me where the chromatography and rotary evaporation markets are heading in 2021, but I do have my own head and some research at hand. And with this we can try to make a few educated guesses about how the chromatography and rotary evaporation fields are going to develop this year.

Here are three predictions for the flash and preparative chromatography market in a nutshell:

  • The preparative chromatography market will continue undergoing a healthy growth, in large part due to the many scientists who are making the switch from traditional open column separations to more automated chromatography systems . The trend to higher automation is mainly driven by user needs for faster separations at lower solvent amounts.
  • The flash and preparative high-pressure liquid chromatogprahy (prep HPLC) market will likely experience a boom in 2021 thanks in large to the consumable business. With an ever-increasing number of samples being purified, especially in the pharmaceutical field, there is a growing demand for consumables such as columns , cartridges , silica gel and others.
  • Stationary phases with smaller particle sizes will increase in popularity. As samples become more and more complex, scientists are likely to search for higher resolution possibilities even at the cost of higher pressure generation.

Now, I can’t talk about chromatography and rotary evaporation predictions without mentioning the impact of COVID-19. The outbreak has caused a surge in demand for development of vaccines and for commonly used drugs that could be helpful in fighting the virus. The pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries are expected to witness a significant growth in the future, in part due to the growing demand for COVID-19 vaccines and treatment drugs. The market for preparative chromatography, as a separation process that can be used in the analysis of ingredients for preparation of coronavirus vaccines and therapeutics, will likely be positively impacted by the presence of the virus.

What about rotary evaporation?

Well, both markets in chromatography and rotary evaporation are expected to maintain a healthy growth. Here is what we expect to happen to the rotary evaporation field in particular:

  • Continuous growth due to increasing R&D expenditure, increased development of large-molecule biopharmaceuticals and higher demand for pure samples in end-use markets
  • Growth of the rotary evaporator market thanks to higher demand for pure samples in pharmaceutical, biotechnology industries, food technology, nutraceuticals, cannabis, mixology, molecular cooking, environmental engineering and diagnosis laboratories
  • North America will likely continue dominating the market due to increasing R&D expenditure, higher growth in biosimilars and generic markets and increasing healthcare expenditure

COVID-19 is expected to impact the chromatography and rotary evaporation markets similarly. Applications, such as solvent evaporation are widely used in sample preparation across pharmaceutical laboratories. Increased use of this technology together with growing development in novel therapeutics for COVID-19 will boost the rotary evaporation market. Higher demand for highest purity in drugs, as well as rising demand for laboratory automation will contribute to the growth of the rotary evaporation field. Distillation, used for making products, such as hand sanitizer, will also help boost the market.

Speaking of using rotary evaporation for making hand sanitizer, I can’t help but offer you a great video to see how it’s done. Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoEAmPXzVzE&t=34s

What do you think about these predictions for the chromatography and rotary evaporation markets? Care to make any of your own in the comments section? Let’s make a deal and come back at the end of 2021 to see if we were correct! If not, I will try to employ an octopus for the post in 2022.

Till next time,

The Signature of Bart Denoulet at Bart's Blog