DOI: 10.1080/10606820390177721 High Throughput Electrophysiology: New Perspectives for Ion Channel Drug Discovery

Proper function of ion channels is crucial for all living cells. Ion channel dysfunction may lead to a number of diseases, so-called channelopathies, and a number of common diseases, including epilepsy, arrhythmia, and type II diabetes, are primarily treated by drugs that modulate ion channels. A cornerstone in current drug discovery is high throughput screening assays which allow examination of the activity of specific ion channels though only to a limited extent. Conventional patch clamp remains the sole tech-nique with sufficiently high time resolution and sensitivity required for precise and direct characterization of ion channel properties. However, patch clamp is a slow, labor-intensive, and thus expen-sive, technique. New techniques combining the reliability and high information content of patch clamping with the virtues of high throughput philosophy are emerging and predicted to make a num-ber of ion channel targets accessible for drug screening. Specifi-cally, genuine HTS parallel processing techniques based on arrays of planar silicon chips are being developed, but also lower through-put sequential techniques may be of value in compound screening, lead optimization, and safety screening. The introduction of ne