IonSense, Inc. today announced the DART-EDU Program, designed to provide educational institutions with access to its Direct Analysis in Real Time (DART®) Mass Spectrometry technology. The program enables a low cost path to providing students with a safe and economical means to use mass spectrometry in undergraduate and graduate level chemical education. The favorable terms of this program will allow institutions to reduce costs by replacing lengthy LC/MS measurements with DART-MS, eliminating significant operational cost by reducing solvent consumption and its related disposal costs. This savings can be used to pay down the short-term lease extended by IonSense.

This Program will offer a semester length 4-month lease of the ID-CUBE® Source, which uses OpenSpot™ Sample Cards so that laboratory classes can leverage the system for easy sampling of liquids or solids such as reaction products, raw materials, foodstuffs, pharmaceuticals, and novel nanotechnology materials. The ID-CUBE source used for this program is very safe with no exposed voltages or sharp needles, and uses little to no solvents. The program is offered for installation on mass spectrometers from major manufacturers including ThermoFisher, Agilent and JEOL.

"Researchers in government and industry have been adopting the DART technology at an increasing pace, and we felt that the undergraduate and graduate students would benefit greatly by enjoying access to the rapid sampling capability of DART," according to Dr. Brian Musselman, IonSense CEO, himself once a manager of the Michigan State University Core Mass Spectrometry Facility. According to Musselman "Our hope is that that teaching universities in particular, with limited access to grants for capital instrumentation, will be able to use their tight budgets more effectively with this technology."