Wow, in February 2026, AFIN-TS will already be eight years old and continues to represent a small, consulting company that is now firmly established in the market. Although the perceived (and sometimes real) situation in the chemical industry in 2025 was generally assessed as rather negative, we were even able to expand our support in consulting and implementation of applied non-target screening. This is a good sign that even in bad times, new (and forward-looking) thinking is taking place. We have already observed a similar phenomenon in our sector during the Corona-years. Our core topic, ‘mass spectrometric non-target screening (NTS)’, but also instrumental analysis with polarity-extended chromatography and mass spectrometry, is in tune with the spirit of the times, which is moving away from exclusive (quantitative) analysis (of known molecules) towards new (qualitative and semi-quantitative) analysis (of initially unknown molecules). In 2025, we continued to publish literature for the chemical industry (German version), but also increasingly for the interested public and various specialist areas (see links below in ‘Publications’). The implementation of modern concepts such as PMT / vPvM, but also NIAS and L&E including the new questions they raise, requires a rethinking of analytical strategy. NTS (and our approaches to it) provides sustainable (because retrospectively usable) answers in each case. Here we research, publish, train, and help partners (in their and our laboratories) in line with the motto ‘with NTS you can answer questions that have never been asked before‘. After the ‘slowed-down’ pandemic years and 2022 with its massive restrictions on our laboratory operations (due to the renovation of our start-up center and the associated – and thus adverse-  circumstances for us) the number of requests that could be processed fortunately rose steadily again in 2023, reaching a maximum in 2024 with over 3000 NTS measurements in our Augsburg laboratory, which remained stable at a high level in 2025. Some research initiatives were successfully completed in 2025, while others are still ongoing and three new ones were launched. In 2025, new topics were explored again, so that new research projects in NTS – especially with digital aim – can also be expected in 2026. Furthermore, our consulting activities also stabilized in 2025, enabling us to win over additional laboratories for NTS consulting in the short, medium, and long term, in addition to our long-established customers/partners. The interested laboratories came mainly from the fields of clinical analysis, food analysis, leachables & extractables analysis, pharmaceutical analysis, environmental analysis, and chemical process analysis, both in the industrial and commercial analytical environment and in the regulatory sector.

Our HIVE platform, which has been in development for more than two years, also got off to a good start. This platform makes analytical data from instrumental analysis and the resulting NTS data machine-readable and AI-accessible for data-handling machine-learning tools and AI solutions. In 2025, the platform developed into a holistic network in combination with quantitative analytics and is now also being used in this area.

And last but not least, our ICNTS 25: The hybrid conference attracted more than 200 visitors for the first time and was a complete success with more than 15 supporting partner institutions (LinkedIn post) in the Erding City Hall. The conference stimulated a lot of technical discussion around 12 keynote lectures, 48 presentations, and 51 posters, resulting in many new ideas until the next ICNTS in October 2027. The Lifetime Achievement Award in NTS 2025 (LinkedIn post) was presented to Juliane Hollender and the Poster Awards (LinkedIn post) went to Ingrida Bagdonaitė, Giulia Martella, and Nicola Montemurro, as well as Daniel Höhn and Kas Houthuijs.

In 2025, we were once again fortunate to process many interesting samples, answer analytical questions, and explore new topics for the future.
We hope this trend will continue in 2026 and look forward to lively exchanges on topics such as ‘Applied NTS’.

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We are very pleased that as a small company (now in its sixth year as a start-up), especially in 2023, we were able to research, publish, train and help partners (in their laboratory and in our laboratory) very extensively on our core topic of non-target screening, but also on instrumental analysis in chromatography (here in particular on SFC) and mass spectrometry. After the year 2022 – with its adverse external circumstances for our laboratory – in 2023 the processable requests increased again continuously, e.g. from the industrial and commercial analytical environment for NTS consulting and NTS products as well as for implementation in our Augsburg laboratory. So we were able to work on many interesting topics, answer new questions and even invest in new analytical instruments. Read more