Berlin, Germany 1/4/17; Bremen, Germany 1/4/17—Bruker has announced the acquisition of two companies. It has bought InVivo Biotech Services, a molecular biology contract manufacturing organization, for an undisclosed amount. The company produces monoclonal antibodies and recombinant proteins, as well as provides services such as cloning, screening and recombinant expression of antigens, and the generation of hybridoma cell lines. Annual revenues total $5 million. Bruker stated that the purchase would provide it with the infrastructure and support to expand its microbiology assay menu for the MALDI Biotyper, provide expertise for combining antibody enrichment with the multichannel information read-out from the MALDI Biotyper and support its activities in translational pathology research with the MALDI Tissuetyper. “We are systematically building up infrastructure to support our rapidly growing consumables business, especially in the field of microbiology and to prepare the market development in anatomical and molecular pathology,” said Bruker Daltonics Executive Vice President Dr. Wolfgang Pusch.

Bruker also announced the purchase of SCiLS for an undisclosed amount. SCiLs provides software tools for MALDI imaging (MSI), including data handling and analysis of multiple data sets. “Our goal is to advance the MSI field and enable a deeper understanding of the spatial distribution of various molecules in the disciplines of biomarker discovery, pharma drug tissue distribution studies, all the way to translational research in anatomical pathology and future diagnostic applications,” commented Bruker Daltonics Executive Vice President Dr. Rohan Thakur.

Both purchases position Bruker to increase its share of revenues from consumables, particularly clinical research and diagnostic offerings. Asked about the challenges for using MSI software for pathology, Dr. Thakur told IBO, “The most pressing challenge in MSI within pathology is the interpretation of the images. Interpreting immunohistochemistry (IHC) images is largely based on the personal experience of the expert pathologist. The challenge in digital pathology is to convert m/z data into information, and compare and contrast to IHC images.”

Bruker has a had an exclusive partnership with SCiLS since 2013. “The SCiLS lab software incorporates a user interface to handle multiple datasets and the means by which to carry out univariate analysis—mean intensities, standard deviations, uncovering discriminative m/z-markers (ROC analysis), hypothesis tests and discovery of co-localized m/z values. Researchers can also implement unsupervised multivariate analysis, meaning the spatial segmentation of large datasets, component analysis for extraction of underlying trends and supervised tissue typing with the calculation of classifiers based on training data and classification of new observations/samples.”