New advances in chemical analysis have made possible rapid developments in key areas of biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and medicine. Advances in labeling, manipulating and analyzing smaller samples, while applying sophisticated new methods in analytical chemistry to obtain more information from increasingly complex samples, have made key contributions to the explosive growth of biotechnology.

Developments in the area of microfabrication and complete chemical analysis "on a chip" have, for example, made possible rapid, massively parallel sequencing and genotyping of DNA and will make possible new applications in functional genomics and medicine. New instrumentation and methods in mass spectrometry make possible direct analysis of the protein contents of cells, essential for exploiting the information in the field of proteomics, in pharmacological studies and in drug screening. Nanoscale technologies are being used to trace biomolecules in living cells. New NMR imaging techniques with, for example, hyper-polarized gases, are producing non-invasive images in biomedical applications.

These, and a host of other exciting developments in bioanalytical chemistry, have dramatically expanded the role of chemical analysis in biochemical applications. Technological developments are occurring at an increasingly faster pace in both industry and academe. At the same time, there is a key shortage of students educated in, and new faculty entering, this field. Thus, there is a clear advantage to establishing closer ties between academe and industry with the goal of promoting analytical biotechnology.