PatchXpress® 7000A Electrophysiology System from Molecular Devices, now a part of MDS Analytical Technologies

Description

Because they play important roles in cell physiology such as excitability and gene expression, ion channels are ideal drug discovery targets. Despite their theoretical suitedness as targets, ion channels have been a relatively untapped resource in the world of drug discovery. There have been no means to directly measure ion channel activity in the context of a high throughput patch clamp assay, so researchers have used other, less direct techniques for screening. The PatchXpress 7000A changes all this, opening up a huge pool of highly "drugable" ion channel targets.

The key to direct measurements with the PatchXpress is voltage control. Other methods (e.g., fluorescence based methods) do not control membrane voltage, so the end result is indirect measurement of ion channel activity. This leads to costly false negatives and false positives. In contrast, patch clamping allows you to control the voltage in a single cell and directly measure the current flowing through its ion channels. The high information content in such a measurement gives more than just a "yes/no" response for each compound tested. For example, you can use voltage control to stimulate cells at particular frequencies, generating use-dependence data of ion channel function to be exploited in the design of smart drugs. For PatchXpress, frequency modulation is a breeze.

At the same time it increases throughput, PatchXpress dramatically lowers the cost per data point (where one data point is produced for each compound tested). At the moment, most ion channel drug discovery groups employ highly trained electrophysiologists to run patch clamp rigs. Without automation throughput is low-even the best patch clampers struggle to get 50 data points a week. With the PatchXpress, technicians will be able to easily measure >10,000 data points per week per system. This represents more than an order of magnitude cost reduction, a savings you cannot afford to miss out on if you are serious about ion channel drug discovery.