Yale School of Medicine and Veterans Administration Acquire Automated Patch-Clamp

The ‘Center for Neuroscience and Regeneration Research’ at Yale School of Medicine and Veterans Affairs West Haven Medical Center has evaluated multiple Automated Patch Clamp (APC) solutions on the market in order to support and enhance their research, predominantly focused on chronic pain. We are happy to announce that the Waxman lab has acquired both Qube 384 and QPatch II 48 robotic patch clamp systems, making Yale and Veterans Affairs West Haven Medical Center one of the few academic institutions to house this powerful new technology.

The choice of both Qube and QPatch II was driven by a desire to both run larger screens and to run more focused assays in physiological solutions. Qube can run larger screens with the ability to run unattended overnight operation and the QPatch family of systems provides the only available medium-throughput APC instruments that can achieve gigaohm seals without the use of seal enhancers. Each of these robotic devices provide high throughput screening capability equivalent to that of half a dozen human electrophysiologists.

A core group of electrophysiologists including Dr. Mark Estacion, Dr. Brian Tanaka and Dr. Sulayman Dib-Hajj, as well as multiple postdoctoral fellows and Yale MD-PhD students, will carry out initial studies using this high throughput instrumentation.

About Center for Neuroscience and Regeneration Research at Yale School of Medicine and Veterans Administration. The goal of the Center for Neuroscience and Regeneration research is to harness the “molecular revolution” in order to restore function in the injured nervous system and to promote functional recovery following spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis, stroke, traumatic brain injury and neuropathic pain. Read more here

About Director Stephen Waxman MD, PhD, (Bridget M. Flaherty Professor of Neurology and of Neuroscience) founded the Center for Neuroscience and Regeneration Research in 1988 at the Veterans Administration campus in West Haven, Connecticut. He served as the Chairman of Neurology at Yale from 1986 until 2009. Dr. Waxman’s research uses molecular, genetic, biophysical, stem-cell based and pharmacological techniques, together with sophisticated molecular imaging and computer simulations, to study the molecular basis for neurological diseases, especially spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis, and neuropathic pain, and to search for new treatments that will alleviate suffering in these disorders. Dr. Waxman has published more than 700 scientific papers and his papers have been cited more than 40,000 times. Dr. Waxman has served on the editorial boards of many journals and has trained more than 200 academic neurologists and neuroscientists who lead research teams around the world.