NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Bruker said today at the 12th annual meeting of the Human Proteome Organization in Yokohama, Japan, that it has launched a second-phase collaboration agreement with SISCAPA Assays Technologies to apply the SISCAPA immunoenrichment mass spec method to its MALDI-TOF instruments.
Through the collaboration, the two firms aim to establish fully automated SISCAPA-MALDI workflows in Bruker's demonstration facilities as well as to develop and validate new protein assays, with a particular focus on assays of relevance to clinical microbiology research.
The effort follows the pair's first-stage collaboration, in which, as reported by ProteoMonitor, they provided proof-of-principle for SISCAPA-MALDI as a tool for protein measurement, publishing one paper in the Journal of Proteome Research demonstrating the technique's high quantitative precision and another in Clinical Chemistry validating the method by measuring endogenous levels of protein C inhibitor in a cohort of clinical samples.
While protein quantitation approaches like SISCAPA have traditionally employed LC-MS technology, MALDI has in recent years drawn interest as an alternative due to its potential for high-throughput and ease of use.
The collaborators' past efforts "establish a solid basis for further exploring the utility of SISCAPA-MALDI-TOF MS in biomarker verification and preclinical research," Leigh Anderson, CEO and founder of SAT, and inventor of the SISCAPA method, said in a statement. "As a company devoted to the development and application of SISCAPA assays, we are excited that Bruker is making the investment to bring the SISCAPA-MALDI workflow into its demonstration facilities, and that this will increase the productivity of labs using SISCAPA and spur the adoption of SISCAPA assays by the biomarker research community."
Financial and other terms of the agreement were not disclosed.