Cellectricon ups throughput of patch clamp system
that promises to speed up the screening of drugs that interact with
ion channels, an important drug target that make up around 15 per
cent of all medicines on the market.
The chip and software product - known as the Dynaflow Proficient System - had been beta tested at GlaxoSmithKline and is an extension of the Dynaflow technology that was first introduced last year.
The original 16-channel chip is already being used by eight of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies, including GSK and AstraZeneca, and the new version has hiked the number of channels - and hence the number of experiments that can be conducted in parallel - to 48.
Dynaflow has been developed to take the labour out of patch-clamping, an experimental technique that remains the primary means of researching ion channels in cells. Using patch clamping, an electrode is pressed tightly against the plasma membrane of a cell, forming an electrically tight seal. The current flowing through individual ion channels can then be measured. For drug screening purposes, the effect of drugs on ion channels can be assessed.
Conventional patch clamping is labour-intensive, but the Dynaflow chip creates an array of tiny liquid test chambers for a patch-clamped cell that allows multiple experiments to be run in parallel.
This increase in capacity makes the system more suitable for more complex testing in drug screening, such as dose-response analysis from a single cell.
The Dynaflow system enables rapid and programmable step-function application on a number of drugs to a single patch-clamped cell, and reduces the cost per data point. Drug discovery and receptor characterisation can be performed with speed and accuracy, with a low consumption of the drug.
As well as characterisation of ion channel function, the scalable microfluidic chip can be applied to several areas in the drug discovery process such as target validation, later phases of lead identification, lead optimisation, and preclinical studies, according to Cellectricon. The system could also be a useful tool in safety assessment applications.
Both the 48-channel (DF-48) and 16-channel (DF-16) chips are compatible with Cellectricon's Dynaflow Pro Platform. This consists of a scan stage, pump system and control software (Dynaflow Commander Pro) that can pre-program experiments including scan protocols and exposure time which increases the scanning flexibility and gives a full record of performed experiments.
DF-48 is optimised for ligand-gated ion channels as well as voltage-gated channels, and can receive multiple compound dose responses per chip and cell: this means it can carry out up to 12 full dose response curves per day.
"Time-consuming and costly campaigns are now completed in weeks instead of months," said Cellecricon in a statement.
The DF-16 is geared towards for voltage-gated ion channels where users easily can extract full dose responses from single cells and receive up to five full dose response curves per day.
"This new system opens up for completely new types of experiments," said Cecilia Farre, Dynaflow Project Manager at Cellectricon. "With Dynaflow Pro System, researchers increase the throughput drastically thereby reducing the cost associated with patch-clamp based ligand- and voltage-gated ion channel drug screening."
