North Brunswick, NJ (March 13, 2006). Sophion Bioscience, Inc. (North Brunswick, NJ) and Sophion Bioscience A/S (Ballerup, Denmark) today announced a QPatch installation in an academic laboratory for the first time. The QPatch 16 was installed this month in the laboratory of Professor Terry Snutch, PhD, FRSC, at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver (Canada).
“Sophion is really excited about this opportunity to install a QPatch in one of the leading ion channel groups in the academic world,” says Chris Mathes, Ph.D., Sophion’s Vice-President and General Manager for North America. “We believe that UBC is the first university to invest in the automated patch clamp technology and that other academic labs will follow suit”.
“We see the QPatch as the future of automated, gigaseal patch clamp,” says Dr. Snutch, a professor in the prestigious Michael Smith Laboratories at UBC. “The QPatch will allow us to perform high-quality ion channel pharmacological and biophysical experiments at a throughput and quality that was not possible before.”
Sophion’s first product, the QPatch is a 16-channel automated patch clamp system already in use at pharmaceutical and biotech companies around the world for safety testing, ion channel screening and drug discovery programs. Automated patch clamp machines measure electrical currents in several cells at once, increasing the throughput compared to manual patch clamp dramatically. This increase in throughput allows researchers to screen more compounds faster albeit maintaining a similar degree of high quality biophysical information content to that for traditional manual patch clamp technologies.
About patch clamp & ion channels
The patch clamp method allows the measurement of very small electrical currents (~ 1 x 10-10 A) in single living cells. These currents reflect the movement of ion channel proteins opening and closing in the plasma membrane of cells. Specialized patch clamp amplifiers measure the flow of ions (e.g., K+ or Na+) through ion channels as electrical currents. All cells, and not just neuronal cells, use these electrical currents to regulate important cellular functions. Ion channels represent important pharmaceutical targets because of their involvement in nerve, muscle, heart and immune function. These channels play a vital role in depression/anxiety, blood-pressure regulation, epilepsy, cardiac arrhythmias and other medical conditions. Ion channel proteins make excellent drug targets because they reside in the plasma membrane of cells and have segments in their pore regions, for example, that make them accessible to novel small molecules. Automated patch clamp machines, like the QPatch, allow pharmaceutical companies to pursue these ion channel targets in a reasonable amount of time and at an affordable cost in comparison to manual patch clamp. For more information about the patch clamp technique and ion channels, please refer to the Sophion Bioscience website (www.sophion.com).
About Sophion Bioscience
Sophion Bioscience, Inc. was established in December 2004 as the US subsidiary of Sophion Bioscience A/S (Denmark). The European parent company, Sophion Bioscience A/S was founded in July 2000, emerging from a successful research and development program at NeuroSearch. Sophion provides advanced products and integrated solutions for automated patch clamping.
For more information about Sophion Bioscience or the QPatch systems, please contact:
Chris Mathes, Ph.D., VP, General Manager of Sophion Bioscience, Inc. (USA): cma@sophion.com (732-745-0221) or
Torsten Freltoft, Ph.D., CEO & President of Sophion Bioscience A/S (DK): tof@sophion.dk
(+45 4460 8811)
About The Snutch Lab
Dr. Terrance P. Snutch is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia. Dr Snutch is also the founder of Neuromed Pharmaceuticals Inc., a biopharmaceutical company developing novel treatments for chronic pain, epilepsy and cardiovascular disease. Dr. Snutch obtained his Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University and carried out postdoctoral studies at the California Institute of Technology with Professors Norman Davidson and Henry Lester.
Dr. Snutch is most well known for his research concerning the identification and characterization of a family of proteins called voltage-gated calcium channels. Calcium channels are found in most cells and contribute to numerous physiological functions, including controlling muscle contraction, regulating nerve cell electrical properties, modulating enzyme activity and gene expression, and triggering the release of neurotransmitters responsible for all nerve cell signaling. Calcium channels have also been implicated in a variety of human pathophysiological conditions such as cerebellar ataxia, migraine headache, autism, epilepsy, cardiovascular disease, chronic pain and psychotic disorders. The development of drugs targeting cardiovascular and neuronal calcium channels to treat these disorders is the focus of significant activity within the pharmaceutical industry.
For further information concerning the Snutch Lab please see:
http://www.snutchlab.msl.ubc.ca/
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