VitaK BV is an SME closely associated with the CArdioVascular Research Institute Maastricht (CARIM), University of Maastricht, The Netherlands. VitaK was established as a corporate business in March, 2001 and has expanded its expertise to areas outside that of CARIM. Presently, VitaK serves both as a platform to commercialize new findings and patents originating from CARIM or from its own research (mainly in the cardiovascular field) and as a research company in which promising fundamental and applied research is performed (e.g. on bone and cardiovascular health, skin care, and diagnostics). It is our aim to commercialize the newly developed knowledge and technology via collaborations, joint ventures, royalties, or research contracts and the profits of these activities are re-invested into new research projects.

VitaK’s prime expertise is technology around all forms of vitamin K and vitamin K-dependent proteins. We are involved in discovering new functions for vitamin K, developing food supplements and health food containing new formulations of vitamin K in combination with other vitamins, minerals and trace elements, and in developing new assays to specifically assess the vitamin K status in liver, bone, cartilage and vascular tissue. One aspect of the latter line is diagnostics based on circulating MGP, which is a patented system to monitor cardiovascular disease via biochemical markers in blood. .

Important research lines within VitaK
1. We have designed and created new conformation specific antibodies which will be implemented in comparable test kits. It is our purpose, to make the tests made applicable for routine clinical diagnosis in clinical centers, where the use of circulating MGP species is a new diagnostic approach in the risk assessment or diagnosis of cardiovascular disease. Second, test systems may be developed for home diagnostics, thus allowing interested consumers to find out his/her vitamin K status, and to monitor improvement thereof while taking supplements or functional foods.

2. Our second line is testing functional foods and food supplements containing vitamin K. These developments make it possible that in the near future vitamin K supplements will be marketed in combination with home diagnostics to test requirement and sufficiency on an individual basis. VitaK BV is in the centre of the development of both the appropriate diagnostics and formulations for vitamin K-containing supplements and functional foods, and is open for collaboration with partners to market this new approach. This is also a challenge for the nutrition industry.