Axon Instruments Inc announced that its OpusXpress 6000A electrophysiology workstation has won a prestigious R&D 100 award. Sponsored by R&D Magazine, the award recognizes the 100 most innovative new technologies of the year. This is the second design award for Axon Instruments in the past 12 months. The first was for the GenePix 4100A Microarray Scanner, part of Axon's functional genomics product line.

The OpusXpress system is a great leap forward for late-stage drug discovery for ion channels and transporters because it greatly improves the efficiency of the discovery process and significantly reduces the cost. Standard drug-screening methods rapidly screen large compound libraries for effects on ion channels, but they produce a significant number of false positives and false negatives because they use indirect measures of channel function. Subsequent secondary screening to validate drug interactions and to determine the mechanism of interaction is slow and labor-intensive. The bottleneck that this creates in the drug discovery process can serve as a disincentive for drug companies to target ion channels and transporters, despite their wide-ranging role in human disease.

The OpusXpress workstation, the world's first commercially available, multichannel, automated oocyte voltage-clamp recording system, automates high-resolution parallel recordings of channel function for secondary ion-channel screening, making it possible to do high-throughput electrophysiology for the first time.

"We are delighted that the editors and independent jurors at R&D Magazine have recognized the significant contribution that the OpusXpress workstation is making to increasing the efficiency of ion-channel drug discovery," stated Alan Finkel, founder and CEO of Axon Instruments. "We believe that high-throughput electrophysiology is the wave of the future-it is changing the way that pharmaceutical companies search for ion-channel drugs."

The frog oocyte is a widely used preparation for expressing cloned ion channels and transporters because it is easy-to-use and allows scientists to set up new electrophysiology assays quickly. The OpusXpress workstation automates the simultaneous impaling of eight frog oocytes (egg precursor cells) and coordinates data acquisition, fluid delivery, voltage control, and real-time analysis for electrophysiology recordings. The system yields high-quality, information-rich functional data on the interaction of compounds with channel proteins. The OpusXpress system has excellent voltage control and recording bandwidth, making it ideal not only for drug discovery but also for research studies of ion channel function. It is designed for both voltage-gated and ligand-gated (i.e., compound-activated) ion channels, as well as ion transporters.

Ion channels are membrane proteins found in virtually all cells of the body. They are responsible for a wide variety of cellular processes including transmission of electrical signals in the nervous system and muscle, initiation of immune responses, and division of cells.

The R&D 100 award has been awarded for over 40 years to innovators from around the world who have designed the most technologically significant products of their times. R&D 100 award winning products from the past include the automated teller machine, the liquid crystal display, the fax machine, the Nicoderm antismoking patch, the anticancer drug Taxol, lab on a chip, and high definition television.