Human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC–CM) are providing new, highly predictive strategies to assess cardiotoxicity in vitro and can thus reduce costs for cardiac safety assessment in drug development. Different technologies are available to assess compound effects on cardiomyocytes, out of all, the patch clamp technique remains the gold standard as it allows to study compound effects both on individual currents but also on the entire ion channel ensemble in form of an action potential (AP). However, such studies have traditionally been limited by the labour-intensive and low-throughput nature of patch clamp electrophysiology.

Here we present the electrophysiological characterization of hiPSC–CM (Cor.4U) cells using our automated patch clamp (APC) platform Qube 384. Electrophysiological investigation of hiPSC-CM requires a high quality set up that offers the possibility to both record APs in current clamp mode and to isolate individual ion channel currents using voltage clamp. Qube is a 384-channel automated patch clamp system that fulfils all these requirements.

Our data illustrate that stem cell technology in combination with Qube’s high throughput capability holds great potential to accelerate cardiac safety studies.