PHILADELPHIA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May. 18, 2009-- At the 109^th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, Bruker Daltonics announced collaborations in the United States for the clinical validation of its MALDI Biotyper workflow for microorganism identification. The MALDI Biotyper has recently obtained the IVD-CE Mark, and is currently for Research Use Only (RUO) outside of the European Union.

The MALDI Biotyper is a rapid, mass spectrometry based platform for identifying bacteria, yeasts and fungi. A high-quality, well-curated database with entries from over 3,000 strains cover approximately 2,000 well-characterized microbial species. Starting from a cultured colony, the identification is performed by matching the measured protein fingerprint against the proprietary MALDI Biotyper database. Including the database search, the automatic identification is performed in minutes, multiple colonies can be spotted on a single target, and about 30-60 identifications an hour can be performed for high throughput. The MALDI Biotyper specificity of identification is very high and comparable to DNA sequencing, false positive rates are near zero, mass spectrometry experience is not required and the consumables cost per sample is very low.

In Europe, Bruker has installed over 40 MALDI Biotyper instruments in routine laboratories for clinical microbiology, and the MALDI Biotyper is rapidly becoming a new standard for robust, rapid microbial identification. Recently, in the United States several collaborations have been initiated to validate the MALDI Biotyper for clinical usage. The Microbiology Service of the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, MD has performed extensive studies using the MALDI Biotyper for identification of yeasts and bacteria. Their tests have shown advantages in cost, speed, and accuracy compared with conventional biochemical testing and gene sequencing, methods routinely used in their lab. The collaboration with the NIH group is currently focused on expanding the database for identification of mycobacteria, nocardia and filamentous yeasts.

In addition, larger scale clinical research studies are also underway at the microbiology departments of two major U.S. medical school hospitals, and results from those studies are expected in 2009.

ABOUT BRUKER DALTONICS

For more information about Bruker Daltonics and Bruker Corporation (NASDAQ: BRKR), please visit www.bdal.com and www.bruker.com.

Photos/Multimedia Gallery Available: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=5967247&lang=en

Source: Bruker Daltonics

Bruker Daltonics
Darwin Asa, Ph.D., +1 978-663-3660, ext. 1149
Life-Science Marketing Manager,
dja@bdal.com