Bruker B.I.QUANT-UR module of Avance IVDr NMR platform

Bruker has announced a product for the quantification of metabolites in urine using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The B.I.QUANT-UR module of the company’s Avance IVDr (In Vitro Diagnostics research) NMR platform is designed to provide precise, sensitive and fully reproducible results that have demonstrated potential in preclinical animal and clinical/translational research.

Urine is an important body fluid in metabolomics due to little interference with metabolite binding proteins. Large sample cohorts in clinical studies demand automated solutions capable of measuring and analysing with highest information content and quantitative reproducibility. The B.I.QUANT-UR module is a completely automated solution that can replace multiple conventional analysis methods.

The Avance IVDr platform is optimised for clinical and translational research. It uses standard operating procedures (SOPs) to automatically generate high-quality spectra, with full quantitative reproducibility and lab-to-lab transferability, from urine measurements. This ensures high quantitative precision of analytical and statistical results at a throughput of approximately 80–100 urine samples in 24 h.

The routines introduced for urine quantification also take into account substantial matrix changes going from neonates to children/adults, which all affect metabolite chemical shifts and lead to varying overlap situations due to ionic matrix changes in these two different age classes.

The module can quantify up to 150 metabolic compounds, including disease markers and non-targeted classification against healthy newborn models, opening areas of research in diseases such as diabetes, metabolic syndrome and obesity. Additionally, the tool can be used to investigate the role which nutrition and environmental conditions play in health, including functional food efficiency and drug dosage.