Trajan Scientific and Medical announced the full commercial release of HDExaminer PRO v1.0 at ASMS 2026, the 74th Annual Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics, held May 31 to June 4 at the San Diego Convention Center. The announcement transitions the software from a successful first-year beta phase into a production-ready product within the CHRONECT Studio platform, designed to enable faster, more confident analytics for protein scientists.
The software is available now. Attendees at ASMS 2026 can see HDExaminer PRO in action at Trajan Booth 906.
Editor's Note: Data analysis has long been the bottleneck in hydrogen-deuterium exchange mass spectrometry, with manual curation of complex multi-timepoint datasets stretching from days into weeks for a single experiment. Software that can automate and validate that process is not a convenience; it determines whether HDX-MS becomes a routine tool in pharma drug development or remains confined to specialist research labs. Trajan's move to a full commercial release at ASMS 2026, backed by an embedded academic collaboration, signals a deliberate push to widen the technique's reach.
Trajan Scientific and Medical announced the full commercial release of HDExaminer PRO v1.0 at ASMS 2026, the 74th Annual Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics, held May 31 to June 4 at the San Diego Convention Center. The announcement transitions the software from a successful first-year beta phase into a production-ready product within the CHRONECT Studio platform, designed to enable faster, more confident analytics for protein scientists.
The software is available now. Attendees at ASMS 2026 can see HDExaminer PRO in action at Trajan Booth 906.
What HDX-MS Does and Why Analysis Software Is the Limiting Factor
HDX-MS is a technique used to probe the higher-order structure and dynamics of proteins by monitoring the rate at which backbone amide hydrogen atoms exchange with deuterium from the surrounding solvent. Because exchange rates depend on solvent accessibility and hydrogen bonding, the resulting data reveals information about protein conformation, binding sites, conformational changes on ligand binding, and protein-protein interactions that static structural methods often cannot capture.
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The technique has become an established tool in biopharmaceutical development for the characterization of monoclonal antibodies, antibody-drug conjugates, biosimilars, and small molecule therapeutics. It is used to validate storage formulations, map epitopes, and assess the impact of manufacturing processes on protein structure.
The catch is data volume. A single HDX-MS experiment generates data across multiple timepoints, multiple protein states, and multiple replicates. Manual curation of this data is time-consuming and requires expert interpretation, historically limiting HDX-MS throughput and restricting the technique to specialist labs. Reducing that curation burden, without sacrificing confidence in the results, is the problem HDExaminer PRO is built to solve.
What Version 1.0 Adds
HDExaminer PRO originated as Mass Spec Studio (also known as AutoHX), developed in Dr. David Schriemer's Structural Proteomics Laboratory at the University of Calgary. Trajan acquired the platform in March 2024 and has since developed it into a core component of CHRONECT Studio, the company's integrated portfolio of automated workstations, software, consumables, and services for mass spectrometry workflows.
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Version 1.0 builds on strong beta adoption and user feedback with a range of targeted enhancements:
- Faster result saving and loading, and improved project-level performance throughout
- The ability to add peptides, protein states, timepoints, and new data files directly into existing projects via the project tree structure, removing the need to rebuild projects from scratch
- Customizable project color coding for clarity and organization across complex, multi-condition studies
- Native support for mutant analysis, allowing researchers to assign point mutations and see them immediately in visualizations
- Unified significance filtering to make meaningful changes easier to isolate across datasets
The native mutant analysis capability is particularly relevant for protein engineering and drug discovery workflows, where researchers routinely compare wild-type and mutant variants to understand the structural consequences of specific amino acid changes. Building this directly into the visualization layer rather than requiring post-processing steps meaningfully reduces friction in a common workflow. As Lab Manager has covered in its reporting on lab automation in pharma, the push in pharmaceutical research environments is consistently toward removing manual steps and reducing the gap between data acquisition and actionable insight.
The University of Calgary Collaboration
Alongside the software release, Trajan announced the continuation of its formal research collaboration with Dr. Schriemer's laboratory at the University of Calgary, established in October 2025. Dr. Schriemer is a faculty member in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology whose lab focuses on integrative structural biology, incorporating proteomics technologies, reagent development, and computational approaches to understand protein structure and function at the level of biological networks and whole proteomes.
The collaboration is structured as an embedded partnership, with Trajan and the Schriemer laboratory co-developing, testing, and validating new workflows and technologies across software, instrumentation, and consumables within a real-world research environment. Trajan's investment includes dedicated funding for graduate students and laboratory personnel focused on expanding CHRONECT Studio capabilities and advancing next-generation structural biology and mass spectrometry technologies.
"This isn't a typical supplier arrangement, it's a true partnership," said Kyle Bachus, VP of Pharmaceutical Solutions at Trajan. "By embedding our teams in each other's environments, we're able to develop and refine technologies in the place where they'll ultimately be deployed to have an impact. At Trajan, our goal in the pharmaceutical market is simple: help the industry develop better drugs, faster, and that is exactly the impact this partnership is built to deliver."
"Working this closely with an industry partner lets us carry our methods all the way through to real-world impact," said Dr. David Schriemer, University of Calgary. "Ideas and fundamental research that start at the bench can be tested, refined, and turned into tools the wider protein science community can actually use and that feedback loop makes our own science stronger, too."
Trajan's Broader Position in Structural Biology
Trajan, founded in 2011 and headquartered in Ringwood, Victoria, Australia, has built its CHRONECT portfolio through a series of strategic acquisitions including LEAP Technologies, Axel Semrau, and Mass Spec Studio. The company describes its approach as delivering complete workflow solutions that span hardware, software, consumables, and services, rather than selling components in isolation.
HDExaminer PRO v1.0 and the Schriemer collaboration together represent Trajan's push to extend the CHRONECT Studio platform beyond HDX automation into broader structural biology applications. For lab managers in pharmaceutical R&D environments evaluating analytical capabilities, the combination of embedded academic innovation and a commercial software track record positions this as a platform worth tracking as the technique continues to scale.
For more on how pharma labs are integrating automation and analytical software into drug discovery workflows, see Lab Manager's coverage of lab automation in pharma and AI in pharma quality control.
