Strategies for enhancing throughput in ion channel drug screening

High information-content screenings based on whole-cell current patch-clamp recordings have become available for ion channel pharmacological research with the development of the QPatch automated patch-clamp technology. A significant increase in system throughput was recently achieved by a tripling of the number of parallel operating patch-clamp sites (from 16 to 48) by the introduction of QPatch HT. In a series of hERG screening studies we have subsequently aimed at increasing the throughput further by reducing the average experimental time consumption associated with each IC₅₀ determination, and by employing alternative calculational algorithms. We have investigated the effect of the following three procedures on effective QPatch throughput:

1. Application of multiple drugs per cell
2. Reduction of the duration of the experimental
   protocol
3. Estimation of drug potency (IC₅₀) based on a
   single inhibitor concentration