At the 50th Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC), Bruker Daltonics Inc. announced the introduction of the new MALDI Sepsityper(TM) kit for the rapid identification of microorganisms from positive blood culture bottles, using Bruker's industry-leading MALDI Biotyper solution. The MALDI Biotyper has obtained the IVD-CE Mark, and is currently for Research Use Only (RUO) outside of the European Union.
The MALDI Sepsityper kit is a set of consumables that enables a rapid and easy identification workflow after the blood culture bottle has tested positive. Microbial cells are harvested from an aliquot of blood culture, are processed using the MALDI Sepsityper kit, and are then identified by the MALDI Biotyper workflow. The identification assay from positive blood cultures is applicable to gram-negative bacteria, gram-positive bacteria, and importantly also to yeasts. Only a few minutes after taking an aliquot from the blood culture bottle, a sample can be ready for mass spectrometry-based molecular identification by the MALDI Biotyper. This workflow is recommended and optimized for blood culture bottles without any charcoal supplements, because such supplements would need to be removed first by additional sample preparation steps.
By using the new MALDI Sepsityper product in combination with the MALDI Biotyper, in approximately 70-90% of the tested positive blood culture samples, a high-confidence identification result is available much earlier than with conventional technology, typically saving one day (or more) in time-to-result (TTR) for the crucial identification step. The MALDI Sepsityper kit and MALDI Biotyper identification rapid blood-culture-to-ID workflow did not lead to any false positives during initial testing and validation. Bruker is planning further MALDI Sepsityper kit validation studies with an expanded number of European clinical microbiology laboratories processing blood culture samples.