St. Petersburg, FL – July 20, 2014 – Field Forensics (FFI) announces that the editors of R&D Magazine have selected the microTLC™ as a winner of the 52nd annual R&D100 Award, an international competition that recognizes the 100 most technologically significant products introduced into the marketplace over the past year.
The R&D100 Awards recognize excellence across a wide range of industries, including telecommunications, optics, high-energy physics, materials science, chemistry and biotechnology. FFI developed microTLC™ in cooperation with scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This is the second R&D100 Award for Field Forensics, having won in 2006 with its ELITE™ Explosives Detection Kit.
microTLC™ is the name of the product as well as the method of analysis. A type of Thin Layer Chromatography (TLC), microTLC™ allows the well-established laboratory technique of TLC to be taken to the field in multiple applications - narcotics and explosives identification, counterfeit pharmaceutical identification, chemical purity analysis and analysis of environmental pollutants. Chemists use TLC in the lab but now with FFI’s easy to use microTLC™, forensics technicians, customs agents and military special operations personnel can perform TLC in the field. Limits of detection are typically at billionths-of-a-gram (nano gram) amounts.
Homeland security and military personnel use microTLC™ to analyze explosives - commercial, military, and home-made (HME) - to quickly identify compounds without complicated analytics or computing power. microTLC™ relieves pressure on forensics narcotics-case backlogs, created by the increasing availability of cocaine, heroin and new classes of designer drugs including synthetic cannabinoids (“spice”) and substituted cathinones (“bath salts”). Many different types of medicines, including anti-fungals, antimalarials, antimicrobials and antivirals, can be analyzed for purity and counterfeit materials.
The microTLC™ is available now. Field Forensics provides consumables, support and services that include method development for new target chemical compounds, TLC plates pre-spotted with calibration standards and reach-back technical support and analysis.
For more information about the microTLC and Field Forensics, please visit: www.fieldforensics.com