Preclinical Drug Safety: High Quality Data obtained with a New Automated Patch Clamp Platform

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SELECTBIO

Many compounds have been reported to prolong the QT interval interfering with the hERG channel, leading to life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias. According to FDA guideline every drug going to market must be tested on the hERG channel. Due to this international regulation, there is a great demand for accurate hERG screens as well as for other pacemaker channels. Manual patch clamp is still the gold standard for investigation of ion channels, but throughput is low and a skilled operator is needed. Cytocentrics overcomes these problems by developing the CytoPatch™ Instrument. Thus outsourcing of patch clamp screening offers a true advantage to drug developing companies: Lowering their operating costs and having access to the latest technology and scientific expertise. As examples for the patch clamp quality of the CytoPatch™ Instrument we show that the electrophysiological and pharmacological properties of the cardiac potassium channels like hERG and kv1.5 investigated on the CytoPatch™ Instrument are in excellent agreement with data known from manual patch clamp: This demonstrates that ion channel screening on the CytoPatch™ Instrument delivers the same high data quality known from manual patch clamp at a throughput level required for safety pharmacology screening.