BD Diagnostics Collaborate With Bruker to Improve Microbial Identification

BD Diagnostics (Sparks, MD, USA) announced an international codevelopment and comarketing collaboration with Bruker Daltonics Inc. (Billerica, MA, USA).

BD Diagnostics is a segment of the Becton, Dickinson and Company (Franklin Lakes, NJ, USA), and Bruker Daltonics is a subsidiary of Bruker Corporation (Billerica, MA, USA). The collaboration will promote an emerging, integrated approach to bacterial and fungal identification and antimicrobial susceptibility testing.

Through this collaboration, identification of microorganisms will be performed with the Bruker MALDI Biotyper, a mass spectrometry-based proteomic "fingerprinting” system specifically configured for rapid identification of bacteria and fungi. BD and Bruker intend to combine the MALDI Biotyper microbial ID system with automated antimicrobial susceptibility testing on the BD Phoenix Microbiology System. The MALDI Biotyper and BD EpiCenter software integration will be further developed to optimize workflows for rapid MALDI Biotyper pathogen identification directly on positive blood cultures from the leading BD BACTEC blood culture system. This rapid blood culture-to-ID workflow is supported by Bruker's new MALDI Sepsitype consumables kit.

Microbial identification and antimicrobial susceptibility testing is the end-point of the major work a microbiology laboratory performs on a daily basis. After culturing and isolating bacteria and fungi from patient specimens, organisms need to be identified and tested to determine which drugs will inhibit or stop their growth. The Bruker MALDI Biotyper allows highly accurate, rapid, and cost-effective identification through a process in which organisms are identified by the unique spectrum of the major proteins and peptides that constitute their makeup.

Frank Laukien, Ph.D., President and CEO of Bruker Corporation, said, "Working with a worldwide leader in microbiology and infectious disease will enable us to further expand the groundbreaking MALDI Biotyper molecular method for microbial identification to its full extent.”

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