High-throughput screening (HTS) is a critical stage of drug discovery used to identify active compounds from large small molecule libraries. However, ion channel high-throughput screening can be technically challenging, with poor assay design and false positive results increasing the risk of costly downstream failures.
Fluorescence-based assays provide efficient and scalable approaches for primary screening campaigns and large compound library evaluation.
Automated patch clamp electrophysiology enables high-quality functional ion channel screening with greater throughput than traditional manual patch clamp approaches.
Cardiac toxicity remains the leading cause of new drug safety side-effects. Current preclinical cardiac safety assays rely on in vitro cell-based ion channel assays and ex vivo and in vivo animal models⁽¹⁾. These assays provide an indication of acute risk but they do not always predict the effect of chronic compound exposure, as recently seen with oncology drugs. Therefore, new assays are required to characterise chronic structural and functional effects in human cells earlier in drug discovery. Impedance-based technology can provide more accurate chronic cardiotoxicity measurements in an efficient manner using human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs).