John Hattersly, head of the metabolic research department and honorary associate professor in the school of engineering at Warwick University, decided to invest in two Maastricht Instruments room calorimeters. What were his motives?
In the mid-west of England, where the University of Warwick is based, there is a big problem with the metabolic syndrome: obesity. In addition to a huge increase in overweight adults, there is also a very sharp increase in the number of obese children. This poses a major health risk in adulthood. For this reason, metabolic research is needed to investigate the (long-term) effects of obesity and the living environment on the body and mental state. So the university was quite keen on metabolic chambers for a variety of metabolic research.
“There are two options when building metabolic rooms.”
How to build
In order to actually build the metabolic chambers, time, effort and many choices and decisions had to be made. And then there is an idea and the question arises how are we going to build them? At the time there were two options available: build the rooms yourself and get information from the people in the field who had already built chambers themselves or hire a company that would build it for you.
In the end it would be too time consuming to self-build the metabolic rooms. Therefore we chose to have a company build our metabolic rooms. We chose Maastricht Instruments, because the company works together with Maastricht University, in that way we got not only a specialized company, but also professionals in their area of expertise.
“The rooms are reproducible, reliable and not much catching up on.”
Since the start of the cooperation we have had very positive experiences with Maastricht Instruments. Their metabolic chambers are reproducible, reliable, not much catching up on and the spin-off company is linked to the university. Which has over a 35 years’ experience in metabolic research and the system has been subjected to extensive validation tests. Maastricht Instruments has more than just the necessary technology and they are very responsive and easy to communicate with.
The Maastricht Instruments rooms are easily adaptable for different research purposes, so in Warwick our rooms are frequently used for various metabolic studies. The metabolic rooms were the first to perform research on female polar travelers,. You can read the news article or enjoy the full article.
References: The Guardian
Photo: ConventryLive, UoW