Upscaling and automation of electrophysiology: Toward high throughput screening in ion channel drug discovery

Effective screening of large compound libraries in ion channel drug discovery requires the development of new electrophysiological techniques with substantially increased throughputs compared to the conventional patch clamp technique. Sophion Bioscience is aiming to meet this challenge by developing two lines of automated patch clamp products, a traditional pipette-based system called Apatchi-1(TM), and a silicon chip-based system QPatch(TM). The degree of automation spans from semi-automation (Apatchi-1(TM)) where a trained technician interacts with the system in a limited way, to a complete automation (QPatch 96(TM)) where the system works continuously and unattended until screening of a full compound library is completed. The performance of the systems range from medium to high throughputs.