Recent Shows – Spring 2025

By Kevin McKeown

Pittcon 2025 kicked off another year of our conference circuit and we enjoyed the opportunity to meet with our customers, partners and international dealers in person!

This year Pittcon was in Boston, one of the most concentrated areas of Biotech and Life Science companies in the entire country, not to mention a huge density of colleges and universities.  We had the opportunity to chat with many students and upcoming graduates, and we want to wish them success in their job searches!

The Pickering Laboratories booth (#1249) enjoyed steady traffic and we’d like to thank everyone who stopped by!  Our all-star booth lineup of Rebecca Smith, David Mazawa and Kevin McKeown stayed busy and provided well-rounded expertise for our visitors.  Our flagship instrument, the Onyx PCX, was available to check out and continues to receive compliments for its flashiness as well as functionality.  In addition, as you might have seen from LinkedIn, we brought very special, seafood-themed giveaways and they were a huge hit.  We hoped that the lobster stress balls celebrated the New England location while reminding folks of our newest Paralytic Shellfish Toxins post-column (PCOX) analytical method and full suite of consumables! 

Later in March, Dr. Maria Ofitserova attended, exhibited and was asked to be a speaker at the AOAC Pacific Northwest exhibition… which as you can imagine kept her quite busy!

This show was hosted in Monterey, California, which is down the road from Pickering Labs and very beautiful no matter the time of year.  Maria presented a talk on Paralytic Shellfish Toxins and how our post-column instruments fit into this expanding area of food safety analysis. 

We have written in our newsletter a few times about the increased attention being given to these dangerous shellfish toxins.  With the oceans warming up, there’s been an increased awareness that algae blooms are detrimental to our food sources: mussels, scallops, clams and oysters.  Increased testing is needed, and being implemented, to ensure that consumers are protected from ingesting any contaminated shellfish.  Maria discussed our PCOX instruments and our new method-specific Mobile Phases and Reagents, formulated and manufactured by request from customers.  These ready-to-use consumables enable analysts to save valuable time.