Handok (President
Young-Jin Kim) entered into a business partnership agreement with Bruker
Corporation which is a global mass spectrometer specialty company. Handok’s
medical business division came to supply Bruker’s representative product, ‘MALDI
Biotyper’ to the country through this agreement.

Bruker is a specialized
company that develops and manufactures various analysis devices used for
clinical studies, life science, biopharmaceuticals, food, environment and industries.
‘MALDI Biotyper’ supplied by Handok to the country is the representative
product of Bruker and a mass spectrometer with [i]laser ionization
technique approved by the MFDS and US FDA.

‘MALDI Biotyper’
enables us to rapidly and correctly analyze microorganism with simple method. It usually takes 4~24
hours to get results with the existing microorganism identification device,
whereas it takes only 5 minutes to check results with ‘MALDI Biotyper.’ It
enables analysis with even small amount of specimen[ii] and as it
holds about 6,000 types of microorganism library,[iii] it can more
correctly and precisely analyze microorganisms even in
species unit. In addition, it came to be used as a test device for patients as
mass spectrometer used in microorganism identification test could be recently
covered by insurance[iv].

“Handok can further
strengthen its business portfolio for microbial diagnosis thanks to partnership
with Bruker,” said President Young-Jin Kim of Handok. “We will try to be
helpful for the healthy lives of patients with infectious diseases through ‘MALDI
Biotyper’ enabling fast and correct analysis,” he also mentioned.

“We
expect we can confer a lot of benefits on people researching microorganisms by
establishing strategic alliance with Handok, supplying Korea with ‘MALDI Biotyper’ and helping them identify hardly
identified microorganisms with its superior performance,” said Senior Vice President Rohan Thakur at
the mass spectrometer business
unit of Bruker
Daltonics Asia Pacific. “As it enables the fast obtainment of microorganism identification results and easy use it and
is highly cost-effective,
it will be a new paradigm for microorganism
identification in Korea,”
he mentioned.

Meanwhile, Handok
launched laboratory medicine business with the introduction of medical
laboratory reagent from Behring, Hoechst AG Germany in the late 1970s as a
momentum and is currently providing various products including in vitro
diagnostic reagents and devices and medical devices through medical business
unit. The representative products in the ‘laboratory medicine business sector’
of Handok medical business unit includes drugs/medical devices for in vitro
diagnosis of Siemens AG, Germany and devices for microorganism identification and antibiotics sensitivity test of
Beckman Coulter. And the representative products in the ‘device business sector’ include analysis devices and reagents for life science sector and
blood glucose monitoring device, Barozen etc. of Eppendorf and Qiagen Germany.