Bruker announced 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. 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. In addition to this paradigm shift for microbial identification, the MALDI Biotyper is increasingly being used for functional resistance mechanism detection. MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry allows for an exact determination of the molecular weight of a broad range of antibiotics.

In the presence of an ESBL, the antibiotic is converted to fragments of predictable molecular weight which are also measured using the MALDI Biotyper. As with bacterial identification, the MALDI Biotyper is thus anticipated to provide both improved, shorter time-to-result as well as potentially better specificity.