MORGANTOWN, W.Va., Oct. 10, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Protea Biosciences Group, Inc. (OTCQB: PRGB) ("Protea") announced today that 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," stated David Halverson, Protea's President.  He continued, "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 already 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.

Jürgen Tressel, Head of Tissue Pathology Business Unit at Bruker Daltonics, added: "Bruker has established partnerships with key opinion leaders in the field of tissue pathology in Europe to develop clinical relevant content for tissue differentiation on the MALDI Tissuetyper™. Additional models developed by Protea Biosciences can add further value to our MALDI Tissuetyper™by content-stacking of assays for multiple tissue types on one system."

About Protea Biosciences Group, Inc.:  Protea Biosciences Group, Inc. (OTCQB:PRGB) is a molecular information company providing proprietary, bioanalytical workflows to the pharmaceutical and life science industries. "Molecular information", the generation and bioinformatic processing of very large data sets, is obtained by applying the Company's technology to identify and characterize the proteins, metabolites, lipids and other biologically-active molecules which are the byproducts of all living cells and life forms.

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Protea is a registered trademark of Protea Biosciences Group, Inc.

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SOURCE Protea Biosciences Group, Inc.