Sable Systems International

Sable Systems was founded in 1987 by John Lighton, then a doctoral student at UCLA studying under the comparative physiologist George Bartholomew, who told him that the electronics work he was doing on his own bench — flow-through respirometry instrumentation for measuring the metabolism of the small animals and insects Bartholomew’s students studied — was worth turning into a firm. It was. The company began in Lighton’s garage, followed him through his doctorate and through a twenty-year professorship at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and grew over the next four decades into the principal global supplier of scientific instrumentation for whole-organism respirometry and metabolic measurement — the equipment that comparative physiologists, biomedical researchers, exercise scientists, and pharmaceutical-safety-pharmacology laboratories use to measure how much oxygen an animal consumes, how much carbon dioxide it produces, and what that says about how the organism is working.

The firm designs, manufactures, and supports research-grade instrumentation for measuring gas exchange (oxygen consumption, carbon dioxide production, water-vapour loss, and other tracer gases) across a very wide range of experimental subjects: from insects in a millilitre-scale chamber through mice and rats in metabolic phenotyping cages up through medium and large mammals and exercising humans. Its principal product families are the FoxBox and Field Metabolic System field-portable instruments; the Promethion series of whole-animal metabolic and behavioural phenotyping cages used in obesity, diabetes, and pharmacological research; the Turnkey Metabolic Measurement systems for research clinics; and the individual gas analysers, mass-flow controllers, and data-acquisition software that other laboratories integrate into custom experimental rigs.

What distinguishes Sable Systems in its category is a combination that a large instrumentation company would not achieve: the founder is a working scientist with over a hundred peer-reviewed publications and a David and Lucille Packard Research Fellowship, so the instruments are designed with respect for the specific measurement problems they exist to solve; and the firm is small enough to run bespoke instrumentation projects, to teach residential courses in respirometry technique, and to answer scientific queries at the level of the individual researcher rather than through a call centre. That configuration has held for nearly forty years and has, in effect, made Sable Systems the reference vendor for the field it serves.