Area Detector Systems Corporation is a California corporation, founded and incorporated in 1983. There are three stockholders: Ronald Hamlin, President, Christopher Nielsen, and Xuong Nguyen-huu, Secretary. Ron Hamlin is President and in charge of all aspects of the business. Chris Nielsen functions as Software Development Manager, Xuong Nguyen-huu is a Consultant to ADSC, working in the area of software development with Chris Nielsen. ADSC manufacturers and sells "area detectors" for use in xray crystallography. Our customers are primarily concerned with research into the form and structure of proteins. Area detectors are used to record xray diffraction patterns from protein crystals. The data are then used to solve the molecular structure of the protein.
We have been servicing the protein crystallography community since 1983, and are on our third area detector technology. The first technology, called a Multiwire Area Detector (MWAD), is the technology upon which our company was founded. The MWAD was developed in a lab where Ron Hamlin was the principal scientist and Chris Nielsen worked on the software. Ron Hamlin left USCD soon after the formation of ADSC. We manufactured and sold the MWAD until 1990, after which ADSC acquired the right to sell a second area detector technology, called an Image Plate (IP). We sold the IP systems until the middle of 1996, and since the, have been developing and manufacturing a third (and current) area detector technology using a Charge Coupled Device, or CCD.
ADSC sold approximately 50 MWAD systems and approximately 35 IP systems. ADSC has an outstanding reputation in the protein crystallography community; many IP customers were previous MWAD customers. These customers were university laboratories and pharmaceutical company laboratories, where most of the research up to now have been carried out. Over the past three years or so, a significant changed has occurred in the field we service. In addition to the data collected in the lab, research groups are utilizing data collection facilities established at Synchrotron facilities, more about which is described below. These facilities are expensive to build and maintain, but have a pure and extremely intense xray beam which researchers find most desirable. The high beam intensity favors the use of CCD detector technology for its fast readout speed over the very slow IP technology, and the tremendous increase in productivity of CCDs over the IPs easily justifies the higher price of the CCD detector versus the IP detector system.
These synchrotron facilities are a growth area in protein crystallography research, and our business strategy is to be the dominant supplier of CCD detector systems to these facilities. This market is described below. At present, we are the dominant manufacturer of "large" area CCD detectors. We have Quantum 4 CCD detector systems at each of the five US Synchrotron facilities (Cornell, Stanford, Berkeley, Advanced Photon Source outside of Chicago, and Brookhaven National Laboratory). We have additional installations in Daresbury Laboratory in the UK and are completing the details of a system sale to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France. The future of this market depends on the continued governmental support of these facilities worldwide. There is no indication of a funding decrease at present and every indication of funding increases well into the future.