Protea Biosciences announced it plans to develop clinical screening assays in various areas of oncology. The assays shall be developed on Bruker's rapifleX MALDI Tissuetyper using Protea's proprietary histology guided mass spectrometry workflows and expertise.
"To develop MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry-based analytical assays, with a potential to improve diagnostic assays in the future, is a natural fit to our business model to commercialize more accurate oncology tests," said David Halverson, Protea's President. "Combining the speed of the MALDI Tissuetyper™ and our proprietary analytical workflows, we are positioned to potentially improve the future diagnosis of a variety of solid tumor cancers, beginning with our work in melanoma."
Protea has performed initial clinical research studies to use mass spectrometry to more accurately differentiate malignant and benign melanocytic lesions by monitoring protein levels in standard biopsy samples. These workflows performed on melanoma samples shall be transferred to the MALDI Tissuetyper to improve speed and throughput. Protea plans to continue to expand the total patient number of the melanoma assay as part of its Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) validation process over the course of this year. Other solid tumors could also be analyzed with these techniques, and Protea intends to offer resulting analytical assays to Bruker as additional content on their MALDI Tissuetyper platform.