Icagen Launches Access to Sodium Channel Research Platform

Icagen (FRA:ICFN) has launched access to its sodium channel platform, allowing researchers to discover drug candidates against sodium channel targets.
According to Pharmaceutical Processing:

Clients can access existing resources within the portfolio or work with Icagen experts to create custom sodium channel cell lines and assays.
“Voltage-gated sodium channels, or Nav channels, are expressed in a variety of tissue types including the central and peripheral nervous systems, cardiac and skeletal muscle, and sensory neurons, and are associated with a variety of disease indications, as well as pain. As such, they are an important focus for much of today’s drug discovery research,” said Neil Castle, Director of Biology at Icagen, Inc. “Icagen scientists, in collaboration with their pharma partners, identified and developed the first selective small molecule inhibitors of Nav1.7 and Nav1.8 and more recently developed the capability to prosecute Nav1.9, a historically challenging pain target. We are now offering the opportunity for others within the pharmaceutical industry to benefit from our expertise in this field, as well as access our full range of Nav research tools for their own drug discovery and development efforts.”
Icagen has assembled the most extensive collection of cell lines stably expressing functional Nav Channels, including human Nav1.1 – Nav1.9, species orthologs (human, cynomologous monkey, marmoset, pig, dog, rat, mouse), distinct disease-related or drug binding site Nav channel mutants, complemented by a broad set of validated functional fluorescence, flux and electrophysiological assays. The company offers services based on these assays from high-throughput screening (HTS) and selectivity to detailed biophysical and pharmacological analysis.
This unmatched portfolio of tools enables Icagen scientists to conduct high-throughput screening of >500K compound libraries, evaluate Nav channel potency and subtype selectivity, and determine species ortholog activity. In addition, Icagen continues to help clients assess mechanism-of-action or site-of-action for candidate molecules and conduct detailed biophysical and pharmacological analyses.

Click here to read the full article.