This review focuses on the chromatography research that has been carried out within industry or in close cooperation with industry and that has been reported in the scientific literature between 2006 and mid-2008. Companies in the health care sector, such as pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, are the largest contributors. Industrial research seems to take place in an open environment in cooperation with academia, peer companies, and institutions. Industry appears ready to embrace new technologies as they emerge, but they focus strongly on making chromatography work robustly, reliably, rapidly, and automatically. “Hyphenated” systems that incorporate on-line sample-preparation techniques and mass-spectrometric detection are the rule rather than the exception. Various multidimensional separation methods are finding numerous applications. Strategies aimed at speeding up the development of new chromatographic methods remain the focus of attention. Also, there is a clear trend toward exploring chromatographic methods for parallel processing along with other strategies for high-throughput analysis.
