MOBILion Systems Inc. has announced the launch of its first commercial High-Resolution Ion Mobility (HRIM) product, MOBIE, which addresses characterization challenges faced during biopharmaceutical drug development and quality monitoring.

MOBIE provides fast, efficient separations with superior resolution and reproducibility, faster, simpler method development, and greater instrument uptime. This highly anticipated new technology will help accelerate and simplify the workflows of challenging analyte classes including peptides, proteins, lipids and glycans, with analysis times 5-60 times faster than conventional separation methods.

The driving technology behind MOBIE is the SLIM (Structures for Lossless Ion Manipulation) technology originally invented by Dr. Richard D. Smith at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). It provides an unprecedented capability to separate and identify molecular structures that can either be too time-consuming or even impossible to detect with established methods such as liquid chromatography (LC).

“MOBIE can not only separate and identify molecules other instruments fail to detect, but it achieves superior performance with rapid analysis times, more efficient analyte-agnostic workflows, and more reproducible results, making it ideal for routine analysis,” says Dr. Melissa Sherman, CEO of MOBILion Systems Inc.: “We are excited to be bringing this best-in-class product to biopharma and biomarker researchers.”

Darlene Murphy, Vice President of Commercial Operations, MOBILion Systems Inc., adds: “In 2017, we set our goal to launch at ASMS 2021 in Philadelphia, even with the pandemic delaying ASMS this year, we remained true to the plan and achieved our goals. In 2020, we completed a successful beta launch, where MOBIE was shown to provide fast, efficient, high resolution critical quality attribute (CQA) monitoring and was beneficial for scientists working with complex and challenging analyte classes such as lipids and glycans. We hired our commercial team and are now ready to bring HRIM to our biopharma and research scientist customers more broadly.”

In 2018, MOBILion announced its partnership with Agilent Technologies to integrate its first HRIM system with Agilent’s 6500 line of Q-TOF Mass Spectrometers to provide a tool for pharmaceutical companies to develop safer and more effective biologic therapeutics, and aid academic researchers in discovering novel biomarkers. Earlier this year, MOBILion announced that it has joined forces with Protein Metrics to integrate with the BYOS biopharma software suite, delivering a full workflow solution with fast, easy data processing. The union of these platforms delivers on the promise of eliminating impediments to identifying and characterizing CQAs with the reliability, repeatability and speed required in modern biopharmaceutical organizations developing increasingly complex protein therapeutics.

“We are excited to be partnering with MOBILion to offer the first commercially available SLIMbased high resolution ion mobility – mass spectrometry instrumentation to researchers in need of faster and more powerful molecular separation, detection and identification capabilities,” says Sudharshana Seshadri, VP and GM of Agilent’s Mass Spectrometry Division. “Agilent’s Mass Spec Division has worked closely with MOBILion to ensure the combined HRIM-MS system delivers superior ion mobility separation performance together with superb mass spectral fidelity, along with the reliability and support necessary for broad practical application.”

About MOBILion Systems, Inc.

MOBILion Systems Inc. is advancing separation science with the commercialization of High-Resolution Ion Mobility Mass Spec (HRIM-MS) based on Structures for Lossless Ion Manipulation (SLIM). HRIM-MS provides fast, efficient, high resolution separations to improve the characterization of biopharmaceuticals and accelerate the drug development process. It provides faster, more accurate and more reliable monitoring of critical quality attributes and is proving extremely beneficial for scientists working with complex and challenging analyte classes such as glycans and lipids. HRIM is untangling the complexities
of these molecules for biomarker discovery and enabling deeper level characterization than what is possible with incumbent approaches, revealing what others leave unseen.

The company is headquartered in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania within the Philadelphia biopharmaceutical and medical innovation corridor.