BREMEN, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Bruker today announces an exclusive licensing agreement with Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands for rapid testing of beta-lactamase activity using MALDI-TOF technology. This new method is fully compatible with the well-established Bruker MALDI Biotyper system, which is used for MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry-based identification of microorganisms in over 700 clinical and non-clinical microbiology laboratories worldwide. In many laboratories, the MALDI Biotyper has replaced classical biochemical testing for bacterial identification in the past five years due to the accuracy, speed, extensive species coverage, ease of use and cost effectiveness of the system. Classical biochemical techniques depend upon detecting different metabolic properties of microorganisms; however, these techniques can take hours or even days for completion and they lack specificity. The MALDI Biotyper uses a molecular approach based on specific proteomic fingerprints from bacterial and fungal strains and published studies have highlighted the greater accuracy offered, as well as the typically much faster time-to-result (TTR). With an installed base of more than 700 MALDI Biotyper systems at the end of 2012, Bruker estimates that in the year 2012 its customers performed about 20 million microbial identifications on the MALDI Biotyper installed base.
