Scientists at the University of Southampton and Birkbeck College,
University of London are developing a platform consisting of an array of
artificial cell membranes that will enable more efficient testing of potential
new drugs.
The Bilayer Platform project, which begins this month, has
been awarded £1.2 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research
Council to develop a new technology that uses artificial bilayer lipid
membranes to evaluate the effectiveness of drugs on ion channels.
Professor Hywel Morgan and Dr Maurits de Planque at the University
of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will use the
clean room technology in the new Mountbatten Building at the University of
Southampton to build this novel platform for parallel on-chip
electrophysiology. Each membrane patch will contain different ion channels.
According to Dr de Planque, ion channels play a pivotal role in a
wide variety of physiological processes and diseases and are consequently of
considerable interest to the pharmaceutical industry. It is for this reason the
Southampton group has teamed up with the Birkbeck group, led by Professor
Bonnie Ann Wallace, who are international experts in ion channel structure and
function.
At the moment, pharmaceutical companies use electrodes to test
entire cells, which can be expensive and involves testing a number of ion
channels within the cell.
About 60 per cent of drugs work on membrane proteins (of which ion
channels are a subclass) and the effectiveness of the drug is gauged by
measuring activity in the ion channel as a result of administering the drug.
"By putting the ion channel into an artificial membrane, we
only have one type of channel, no living cells and a relatively inexpensive
method for testing for several of these types of channels at once," said
Dr de Planque.
The project, which will take just over three years, will benefit
public and private sector industries, as well as driving new research for the
treatment of diseases such as chronic pain, epilepsy, and certain types of
heart disease. The new technology platform will have many applications for drug
discovery and testing long after the research period ends.
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