Bruker announced the acquisition of InVivo Biotech Services GmbH, headquartered in Hennigsdorf, Germany, near Berlin. InVivo Biotech is a molecular biology contract manufacturing organization (CMO), and a leading provider of monoclonal antibodies and recombinant proteins. InVivo Biotech also has significant experience in the development and production of innovative immunoassay components and research kits. In 2016, InVivo Biotech had revenues of approximately $5 million. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.
InVivo Biotech is an ISO 9001 certified CMO with over 18 years of experience in mammalian cell culture and protein production. The company is providing monoclonal antibodies and recombinant proteins for its CMO customers, which include diagnostics companies, major research institutes and biopharmaceutical companies. Its production covers quantities from milligrams to grams of purified antibodies, including all subclasses of IgGs, IgMs and IgEs derived from a collection of more than 3,000 different hybridoma clones producing human, rat or mouse monoclonals. InVivo Biotech uses proprietary media for serum-free cultivation to facilitate highly productive and cost-effective processes in a high cell density fermentation process with yields up to 500 mg of antibody per liter of culture per day.
InVivo Biotech provides a complete range of biotech services, from cloning, screening and recombinant expression of antigens to the generation of hybridoma cell lines, and from characterization of antibodies to final production of the developed monoclonal antibodies. InVivo Biotech's selection of bacterial, insect and mammalian protein expression systems provides a wide range of choices for various applications, taking into account specific CMO customer needs concerning quantity, bioactivity, structure, post-translational modifications and purity. Recombinant proteins are produced via stable or transient transfection.
InVivo Biotech will continue to operate under its existing name and management team, and is looking forward to expanding its CMO partnering business with existing and additional CMO customers.
This major addition in expertise and infrastructure for consumables development, validation and production also will support Bruker´s strategy of expanding its microbiology assay menu for the MALDI Biotyper platform. Examples include Sepsityper IVD-CE assays for the fast identification of bacteria from positive blood cultures, RUO assays for selective testing of antibiotic resistance with the MBT-STAR assay family, and work-in-progress syndromic panels for the MALDI BioTyper as a multiplex PCR reader.
InVivo BioTech's kit development and production capabilities are expected to shorten time to market for such new assays. Furthermore, the expertise in monoclonal antibodies opens new possibilities to combine the specificity of antibody enrichment with the multi-channel information read-out via the MALDI Biotyper platform. Antibody enrichment strategies prior to MALDI Biotyper analysis enable new workflows and could further shorten microbial cultivation and time to result (TTR).
These capabilities also support Bruker's activities in translational pathology research with the MALDI Tissuetyper. Enzymes involved in the digestion and sample preparation of formalin-fixed-paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue are expected to complement the MALDI Tissuetyper platform. Moreover, monoclonal antibodies against new protein biomarkers identified in a MALDI Tissuetyper workflow can be efficiently produced at InVivo Biotech.
Dr. Wolfgang Weglöhner and Siegmund Karasch, the founders and Managing Directors of InVivo Biotech, commented, "We are very pleased by the expanded opportunities for our business using the global commercial infrastructure of Bruker, particularly for microbiology and pathology. With our molecular biology core products and CMO services, we anticipate significant growth and expansion opportunities."
Dr. Wolfgang Pusch, executive vice president at Bruker Daltonics, added, "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. Together with our recently announced acquisition in the field of multiplex PCR-based microbiology testing, the InVivo Biotech acquisition is expected to greatly accelerate our assay and consumables business expansion."
The MALDI Biotyper family of systems enables molecular identification, and taxonomical classification or de-replication of microorganisms like bacteria, yeasts and fungi. Classification and identification of microorganisms is achieved reliably and quickly using proteomic fingerprinting by high-throughput MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry. The MALDI Biotyper uses proteomic fingerprints from bacterial strains for identification. Published studies have highlighted the greater accuracy, broader coverage and lower cost offered, as well as faster time-to-result (TTR).
Applications of the MALDI Biotyper platform include clinical routine microbial identification, environmental and pharmaceutical analysis, taxonomical research, food and consumer product safety and quality control, as well as marine microbiology. In many European and international laboratories the MALDI Biotyper has replaced classical biochemical testing for bacterial identification due to its accuracy, speed, extensive species coverage, ease of use and cost effectiveness. Classical biochemical techniques detect different metabolic properties of microorganisms, can take many hours or even days for completion, and often lack specificity.
The robust MALDI Biotyper workflow requires minimal sample preparation and offers low consumables cost. The products of the MALDI Biotyper family are available in a research-use-only (RUO) version, as the U.S. FDA-cleared MALDI Biotyper CA System, or in an IVD-CE version according to EU directive EC/98/79. The MALDI Biotyper also has medical device registrations in numerous other countries. RUO versions of the MALDI Biotyper allow selected high-value antimicrobial resistance tests in translational research, and subtyping capabilities.
The MALDI Tissuetyper solution, an emerging technology, enables the use of MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry as a powerful mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) tool, which is highly complementary to traditional imaging technologies in histology. The MALDI Tissuetyper allows pathologists a fast identification of proteins in tissue samples. In contrast to traditional histological tissue analysis, the MALDI Tissuetyper requires neither a molecular probe nor an antibody. The MALDI Tissuetyper offers multiplex analysis of multiple potential biomarkers simultaneously in an untargeted approach. Identification of protein expression profiles, will lead to the discovery of clinically useful tumor biomarkers which could be incorporated into future diagnostic and treatment strategies. MALDI Tissuetyper provides complementary information to immunohistochemistry (IHC) and in many cases can differentiate cell populations that cannot easily be differentiated by IHC. In additional, it might save valuable biopsy material, in cases where only limited tissue sample is available. The MALDI Tissuetyper can be used for biomarker discovery studies, but also for multi-marker tissue-typing and classification. The MALDI Tissuetyper is currently available for research use only.