Electrophysiology for Drug Discovery
Numerous classes of drugs have been successfully developed and used to ameliorate or cure disease by interacting with ion channels/transporters and they therefore represent an important class of therapeutic targets. In addition to their therapeutic effects, several drugs have either been removed from the market or have had clinical trials halted due to unwanted interaction with ion channels causing life-threatening adverse effects. As a result, regulatory agencies such as the FDA highly recommend testing of all clinical candidates against some of these ion channels. In order to assess the functional interaction of chemical entities with ion channel activity directly, patch clamp electrophysiology is performed. Over the years, this technique has become the gold standard for assessing ion channel function. However, this technique requires electronic and optical equipment from different vendors, a high degree of operator skills, is not automated, and is laborious. Furthermore, this conventional technique does not have the potential to be significantly automated and scaled-up. Today, a skilled patch clamp electrophysiologist will perform 5-15 patches per day, 3-4 days/week. The IonWorks?family of automated patch clamp systems will overcome the major drawbacks to traditional patch clamp techniques. These turn-key systems use planar substrates and generate voltage clamp data with the same fidelity as conventional patch clamp techniques. One of the two systems is a high throughput system capable of generating data from 1000 to 3000 patches/day in whole cell mode while the other system is an assay development and safety profiling system which offers flexibility and sensitivity to record whole cell currents or single channel events from cells. These products, which span the drug discovery process, will be instrumental in meeting the demand that has been placed on pharmaceutical and biotech companies as well as enabling life science researchers interested in studying ion channel function.

Wilhelm Lachnit, Ph.D.
Director, Business Development
MOLECULAR DEVICES

Contact:
Tony Nardei
Drug Discovery Division
Molecular Devices Corp.
(800) 635-5577, ext. 3633
[email protected]