Instruments from the Automated Patch Clamp System are now used in a wide range of applications, from basic research intochannelopathies to routine cardiac safety assessment. Over time, their application in cardiac safety screening has grown, and APC is now a widely used and acknowledged approach in most, if not all, safety testing laboratories.Only a few drugs have been withdrawn from the market due to pro-arrhythmic complications since the ICH S7B non-clinical guidance was introduced in November 2005, requiring all new drugs to be tested for activity on the current carried by hERG expressed in recombinant cell lines using the patch-clamp technique.
Since its creation more than two decades ago, AutomatedPatch Clamp System has had a considerable impact on drug discovery, and it will continue to play a vital role in ion-channel drug discovery and safety testing in the years ahead. As the area of channelopathy grows, high-throughput API will become increasingly important in determining the impact of various variations on channel kinetics and, eventually, disease phenotype. Patients' variations and mutations were detected and recombinantly expressed in cell lines or patient-derived stem cells. APC could be employed as a diagnostic tool or in the field of customised medicine to screen for substances that could benefit each a particular patient. Because APC devices and consumables have become more affordable, patch-clamp data throughput and cost per data point have decreased dramatically in recent years, now being comparable to fluorescence-based assays like FLIPRTM, something that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago when patch-clamp experiments were performed on a conventional rig, recording a single cell at a time.
Automated Patch Clamp System Market as a complementary technique to manual patch clamp, not completely replacing conventional rigs,but rather being used at an earlier stage and in more aspects of drug discovery simplify and increase the throughput of finding useful compounds, ensuring their safety, and, ultimately, driving effective and safer drugs to market.
