omation mbers - Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening

3:30 pm Tuesday, February 3 High Throughput Screening – Ion Channels Room A2
Chris Mathes
Axon Instruments, Inc.
3280 Whipple Road
Union City, California 94587
chrism@axon.com
PatchXpress: Automated Patch Clamp for High-quality, High Throughput Recordings of Both
Voltage and Ligand-gated Ion Channels
Because they play important roles in cell physiology, such as excitability and gene expression, ion channels
are ideal drug discovery targets. Ion channels have been a relatively untapped resource in the world of drug
discovery. No means have existed to directly measure ion channel activity in 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 PatchXpress records currents through both
voltage and ligand-gated channels. An important example of a voltage-gated channel is the human ether-a-gogorelated
gene (hERG) channel. Accurate screening against hERG channels is an essential step in the drug discovery
process. In general, lead compounds are tested against hERG channels for safety reasons. Safety pharmacology
requires high quality and dependable data from hERG screens for decisions regarding the fate of lead compounds.
The PatchXpress is an efficient tool for automatically recording reliable hERG currents from 16 cells simultaneously.
The PatchXpress uses planar patch-clamp electrodes, called SealChips, made exclusively for Axon by Aviva
Biosciences. These electrodes provide high resistance giga-ohm seals for high-quality patch-clamp recordings.
With the PatchXpress, sophisticated protocols can be performed, complete with full dose-response experiments
on individual cells. Alternatively, the PatchXpress can be used for rapidly screening hundreds of compounds per
day. When it comes to safety testing, high-quality recordings are essential and the PatchXpress provides the speed
and confidence required for effective hERG screening. Data from PatchXpress users will be presented.
4:00 pm Tuesday, February 3 High Throughput Screening – Ion Channels Room A2
Jia Xu
AVIVA Biosciences Corporation
11180 Roselle Street, Suite 200
San Diego, California 92121
jxu@avivabio.com
Improving Recording Quality for High Throughput Patch Clamp
Recording quality is of central concern for high throughput patch clamp screening. It is determined by the both the
quality of the biochip and the quality of the cell preparation. Our new generation of SealChip has stable Rm and
low Ra performance while maintaining high gigaseal rate. Our cell preparation methods are designed to optimize
seal rate, Rm, Ra and stability performance. AVIVA is improving its SealChip products continuously to meet our
customers performance requirements.
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PODIUM ABSTRACTS