Bruker Announces MALDI PharmaPulse™, a Breakthrough High-Throughput Screening (HTS) Solution for Drug Discovery

At the 63^rd ASMS Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics, Bruker announced a new high-throughput screening (HTS) solution designed to help pharmaceutical companies achieve high throughput, lower cost and higher specificity in drug discovery. The new MALDI PharmaPulse™ solution combines the speed, sensitivity and ease-of-use of Bruker’s robust MALDI-TOF systems with industry-leading HTS robotics and automation software from HighRes Biosolutions, Inc. of Woburn, MA.

The new MALDI PharmaPulse solution is the latest addition to Bruker’s portfolio of innovative products designed to assist pharmaceutical, biotech and CRO customers accelerate drug discovery and development. Based on the autoflex™ speed MALDI TOF system, and incorporating an integrated automation solution from HighRes Biosolutions, this new HTS solution offers the fastest commercially available mass spectrometry-based screening solution with significantly lower cost per sample. In addition, its label-free detection of substrates accelerates assay development, reduces complexity of screening, and potentially minimizes artifacts from interferences with the labels used in traditional HTS technologies.

The unique capabilities of the novel MALDI PharmaPulse solution for driving higher throughput at dramatically lower costs for screening in drug discovery, include:

· Less than 1 second per sample analysis time, comparable to the pulse of the human heart, and fast enough for true high throughput screening (HTS)

· autoflex speed MALDI TOF equipped with proprietary 2 kHz smartbeam™-II laser

· Integrated automation solution from HighRes Biosolutions seamlessly prepares and feeds MALDI plates from 96, 384 or 1536 assay plates

· MALDI-detection removes need for SPE cartridges or LC columns, uses 100x less solvent per sample than conventional LC-MS methods

· Does not require derivatization in comparison to fluorescence workflows

· Development times for new assays and complexity is dramatically reduced without the need for chromatographic method development, SPE or MRM setup, or derivatization protocols

· The extremely low sample volumes required for detection (typically ~1 mL) enables “Single Well Kinetic Readout” by sampling multiple time points per assay

· The full automation, coupled with speed of MALDI TOF, enables the screening of over 50.000 compounds per day

Due to this unique feature set, the MALDI PharmaPulse enables pharmaceutical customers to accelerate their drug discovery efforts with higher throughput assays, delivering higher quality results while lowering costs.

Dr. Paul Speir, Senior Vice President for the Americas of the Bruker Daltonics division, stated:“The unique MALDI PharmaPulse solution was developed in close collaboration with leading HTS scientists in the pharmaceutical industry. These types of collaborative projects enable Bruker to deliver integrated solutions that truly meet the emerging needs of pharma customers looking for breakthroughs.”