Marshall Isotopes Ltd. was founded in 1998 as an independent, privately owned entity. The company announced in July 1999 the completion of the construction and commissioning of its first plant, the largest of its kind for producing of stable isotopes of oxygen; O-18 and O-17. The plant is located in the Industrial Zone of Beer - Tuvia, Israel. Regular production of the two standard products,10% and 95% oxygen-18 enriched water started in summer 2000. In the summer of 2002 the company completed the construction of its second plant which doubles the  O-18 production to total of 60 kgs annually.

Ever since the discovery of the O-18 and O-17 isotopes in 1929, attempts have been made to find
methods of separating these isotopes from the O-16. These processes include fractional distillation
of water, liquid oxygen, CO, NO and organic liquids, diffusion of oxygen, electrolyses of water and
wide variety of chemical exchange reactions. Of all these processes only few have been found
promising for industrial scale; the fractional distillation of water is one of them. Fractional distillation
of water has been a favorite process since the early days of interest in O-18.
The small separation factor for oxygen isotopes coupled with low natural abundance (0.2% for O-18)
require a large number of theoretical plates in any separation plant designed for high enrichment. As a
consequence, a large holdup and long start up time are needed.
The distillation of water is performed in packed columns filled with special packing and connected in
series and parallel. The technology used in the plant of Marshall Isotopes Ltd. is the fractional distillation of water and the plant is operating continuously.

Our plant has a laboratory fully equipped with sophisticated mas-spectrometer to measure routinely the isotopic composition of our products and quality control.

Our main products, the 95% and the 10% enriched water used primarily as follows:

95% O-18 water:
The Positron Emmission Tomography (PET) scanning with the radiopharmaceutical fluorine-18
deoxyglucose [18F]FDG is now generally accepted as a method for measuring glucose metabolism.
The synthesis of [18F]FDG involves the production of Fluorine-18 in a cyclotron using the 18O{p,n}F18 nuclear reaction. The major source for the Oxygen-18 for this reaction is highly enriched water.Our water are of top quality and specifically suitable for the the FDG production process.

10% O-18 water:

The 10% O-18 enriched water is used for two main applications:

a) Measuring of energy expenditure in free-living humans.
Doubly labeled water method is used for indirect calorimetry,
which has been extensively validated in animals and humans.
The method is completely safe, requires only periodic sampling of body fluids, is non-restrictive,
and is ideally suited in free-living or hospitalized patients.

b) Total body water (TBW) composition and its alterations is often used to determine adequacy
of nutritional support and presence or progression of disease.

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