The analytical repertoire of BEVITAL covers defined, cross-talking pathways, cofactors involved, and biomarkers reflecting key lifestyle factors (smoking, meat intake, coffee consumption), nutritional status, kidney and endothelial function and inflammation. Biomarkers are allocated to complementary platforms characterized by multiplexing, high capacity (several thousands samples), large dynamic range (from 1 nM to several mM), and low volume consumption to save precious biobank material. More than 120 biomarkers are measured in less than 500µL. Notably, all methods based on mass spectrometry include authentic isotope-labelled internal standards, which is paramount to obtain adequate precision and accuracy, as recently reviewed by Khamis et al. These are performances delivered by targeted metabolomics, as opposed to untargeted metabolomics, which capture only abundant metabolites and with the inherent weakness of low capacity, low precision, possible assay interference and misidentification.

BEVITAL was founded in 2003 by members of a research group with more than 25 years experience in bioanalytical technology, including mass spectrometry. The research group / BEVITAL have been partners in several international projects, including EU funded projects, that involve instrument development, establishment of new technologies, and their application in large epidemiological projects. Most recently BEVITAL has participated in a large multicenter lung cancer study, organized within the frame of the lung cancer consortium (LC3), funded by the National Cancer Institute (US), and including 11000 cases and controls recruited from 20 centers, in Europe, US, Asia and Australia.

The analytical repertoire includes methods that have been developed by scientists and technicians employed at BEVITAL. Most methods have been published in leading scientific journals within the fields of analytical technology, including Clinical Chemistry and Analytical Chemistry. Importantly, this means that the method section of the article reporting on your project results will include reference(s) to articles in prestigious journals.

Prices of analyses undertaken by BEVITAL are extremely competitive and are kept at production costs. The reasons are two-fold. Firstly, BEVITAL is owned as a whole by a non-profit foundation, supporting research into vitamin deficiency and related topics. There are no private shareholders and therefore no incentive to inflate the cost and thereby the prices. Secondly, all instrument maintenance and even extensive repair are performed by the technical staff of BEVITAL, ensuring expensive service contracts provided by the instrument vendors are not required.

Most scientists at BEVITAL have for decades been involved in scientific projects related to the biomarkers analyzed by BEVITAL. If requested, BEVITAL staff can provide academic support including collaboration and contributions to writing of funding applications and scientific articles. Formally, BEVITAL is an SME that have been approved as a partner in projects funded by the EU Commission, Norwegian Research Council, Norwegian Cancer Society, National Cancer Institute (US), National Institutes of Health (US), and several other funding agencies.