Biognosys and Bruker Form Partnership for Advanced Proteomics CRO Services

Bruker Corporation (Nasdaq: BRKR) and Switzerland-based Biognosys AG have announced a strategic partnership, in which Bruker has made a majority-ownership investment in Biognosys. Financial details were not disclosed. J.P.Morgan acted as exclusive financial advisor to Biognosys. Several of Biognosys’ earlier investors have sold their shares to Bruker in a secondary transaction, and Bruker will make new primary investments in Biognosys.

Co-Founder and CEO Dr. Oliver Rinner and his leadership team will continue to manage Biognosys as a proteomics and proteogenomics CRO services and proteomics software company. Going forward, Biognosys’ biomarker and biopharma customers will benefit from additional services and footprint in the US. Biognosys will access Bruker’s 4D proteomics timsTOF technology for deeper, unbiased high-precision proteomics that is not impaired by epitope cross-reactivity - all with higher throughput and excellent reproducibility.

Biognosys mass spectrometry-based proteomics solutions help CRO services and proteomics software customers in uncovering connections between genome, transcriptome, and phenotype to explore the static and dynamic nature of disease biology. In particular, the Biognosys TrueTarget™, TrueDiscovery™, and TrueSignature™ research service solutions provide deep, peptide-level proteome insights for drug discovery and development:

• TrueTarget™ uniquely addresses pressing challenges in drug discovery by identifying on- and off-target effects, and characterizing binding sites. 
• TrueDiscovery™, powered by Spectronaut® proteomics software, offers unbiased, multi-dimensional insights into the expression, function, and structure of up to 4,200 proteins in plasma, up to 11,000 proteins in other biofluids, and up to 13,800 proteins in tissue or cell lines. 
• TrueSignature™ high-precision, customizable, multiplex panels enable simultaneous absolute quantification of proteins for pharmacodynamic readouts and clinical biomarker monitoring, in support of pharmacoproteomics-enhanced clinical trials.

The Bruker-Biognosys collaboration is expected to create unique synergies between Biognosys’ versatile portfolio of proprietary proteomics services, software and kits, and Bruker’s pioneering timsTOF platform. As a result of the strategic partnership, Biognosys plans to open its first advanced proteomics CRO services laboratory in the United States.

Dr. Oliver Rinner, CEO and Co-Founder of Biognosys, commented: “We are pleased to partner with Bruker to leverage our unique synergies to enable customers to explore the depth of the proteome from early research to clinical development. We have worked closely with Bruker to support dia-PASEF® high-throughput, deeper proteomics methods within our Spectronaut® software. Biognosys remains committed to maintaining Spectronaut® as a high-performance vendor-agnostic proteomics software. We plan to establish our US CRO lab in Massachusetts using the timsTOF platform, so that our customers can benefit from multiple MS technologies.”

Dr. Rohan Thakur, President of the Bruker Life-Science Mass Spectrometry division, said: “We are delighted to partner with Biognosys to expand our CRO business in the US. We have many common biomarker and biopharma customers, and even more potential customers may prefer a proteomics CRO services expert like Biognosys for rapid, highest quality and flexible insertion of proteomics into their biomarker or biopharma discovery and development. With the rapid scientific acceptance of dia-PASEF® workflows, our partnership offers a unique combination of proteomics applications and data-science expertise, which can benefit more biopharma and diagnostics companies in using unbiased proteomics for decision-making.”

Professor emeritus and proteomics pioneer Dr. Ruedi Aebersold added: “For over a decade, ETH spin-off Biognosys has translated novel proteomics methods pioneered in our research group into robust, high-performance workflows for large-scale basic and translational research. I am delighted that this new partnership between Biognosys and Bruker will further accelerate access to high performance proteomics. It will also provide opportunities to develop next-generation technology and methods to determine unexplored but functionally relevant dimensions of the proteome, such as the modulation of proteoform composition, and protein interaction networks as a function of cellular state.”