'Patch on a Chip' under development by Axon Instruments

New fabrication method will allow thousands of simultaneous patch clamp recordings

Yale University (New Haven, CT) has licensed to Axon Instruments Inc. (Foster City, CA) a revolutionary technology for screening new drugs that act on cell-membrane ion channels and transporters. Ion channel activity is important for studying many medical disorders, among them migraine headaches, epilepsy, irregular heartbeat, and cystic fibrosis.

Axon, a developer of instrumentation and software for genomics and high throughput screening, plans to use the technology as the core component in a "Patch-Clamp-on-a-Chip" device. As part of the agreement, Axon will fund ongoing research into the technology at Yale. Axon has secured the rights to license any downstream technology developed from this research.

The inventors of the new technology are Kathryn Klemic, a postdoctoral associate in physiology at Yale's School of Medicine; Frederick Sigworth, a physiology professor; James Klemic, a postdoctoral associate in electrical engineering and applied physics; and Mark Reed, the Harold Hodgkinson Professor of Engineering and Applied Science and chairman of the Department of Electrical Engineering.

The researchers have developed a new fabrication method for electrodes used in patch clamp recording of ionic currents. Based on this advance, inexpensive integrated planar electrode and amplifier arrays can be microfabricated for use in highly parallel electrical assays of cells. Microfluidic channels can be incorporated on-chip to permit fast solution exchange on both sides of the membrane. The electrode arrays can be used to record from standard cultured mammalian cell lines.

"A highly parallel electrode array makes possible multiple, simultaneous, single-cell electrical recordings," Sigworth said. "Both single-channel and whole-cell currents can be measured with high fidelity. The high parallelism increases the throughput of patch-clamp screening by several orders of magnitude, enabling industrial-scale screening of pharmaceutical agents."

"We are extremely enthusiastic about developing an automated, high-throughput patch clamp device," said Chris Mathes, Axon's manager of high throughput electrophysiology screening. "Currently, pharmaceutical screening of important ion-channel drugs is inefficient because the assays are indirect. Because the Yale technology replaces unwieldy conventional patch clamp electrodes, we now have the potential to record ionic currents from a thousand mammalian cells in parallel. This 'Patch-Clamp-on-a-Chip' device can resolve a major bottleneck in the drug discovery process and reduce the total drug discovery timetable."

Andy Blatz, Axon's vice president of screening technology, added, "Axon Instruments is uniquely placed to bring this technology to market. We can leverage our existing expertise in patch clamp hardware and software development to produce an instrument that we believe has the potential to provide more and better information to the pharmaceutical companies than existing patch clamp approaches."

founded in 1984, Axon Instruments develops hardware and software products for cellular neurosciences research. Axon's goal is to produce a range of superior yet affordable instrument and software systems for drug discovery and diagnostics, aimed at the pharmaceutical industry, biotechnology companies, and academic researchers.

For information about the development of Axon's high-throughput electrophysiology devices, please contact Chris Mathes at 650-571-9400 or chrism@axon.com.

Edited by Laura DeFrancesco
Managing Editor, Bioresearch Online
Email: ldefrancesco@bioresearchonline.com