膜片钳阵列技术及其应用于药物筛选的研究进展

The Patch-Clamp Array Technologies and their Application in Pharmaceutical Screening

离子通道是一类重要的药物作用耙点。膜片钳技术是目前进行离子通道研究和影响离子通道药物研究的最好方法。但膜片钳技术通量低,成为应用该法进行药物筛选的最大障碍。膜片钳阵列技术是在普通膜片钳技术基础上发展起来的高通量技术,包括平面膜片钳阵列技术和微管自动化膜片钳技术,已经在药物筛选中得到应用。本文仅就这2种方法当前的研究进展及其在药物筛选中的应用做简单的介绍。

Ion channels are an important class of therapeutic drug targets. Since the patch-clamp method was first described nearly 30 years ago, it has been the best way to study ion-channel function and related drugs. But the low throughput has always been the main embarrassment for voltage clamp applying to pharmaceutical screening. Effective screening of large compound libraries in ion channel drug discovery requires the development of new electrophysiological techniques with substantially increased throughputs compared to the conventional patch clamp technique. Recently, a numher of researchers have started to automate patch clamping by clamping or developing planar microelectrode arrays. This article either automating conventional micropipette-based patch discusses the technical details, advantages, and disadvanrages of each approach and technique and reviews the brief history of this method used to pharmaceutical screening .