QPatch – Automated Patch Clamp

The benchmark solution for efficient, high-quality ion channel studies in physiological solutions

Sophion QPatch II improving the benchmark for cardiac safety and advanced electrophysiology

Setting the standard for cardiac safety and advanced electrophysiology with QPatch

QPatch® is a fully automated patch clamp system designed to perform parallel gigaseal ion channel recordings of 16 or 48 cells. As a true walk-away solution, QPatch enables you to increase throughput and laboratory efficiency while ensuring the best data quality for your ion channel and drug discovery research. QPatch makes automated patch clamp easy, from cell handling and assay setup to analysis for your research data.

QPatch offers:

  • Giga-Ω seal in physiological Ringer’s solutions – no need for seal enhancers or fluoride
  • A true walk-away solution to meet demanding timelines for faster and more precise laboratory workflows and throughput
  • Accurate and rapid control of temperature
  • User-friendly interface ensures easy and efficient onboarding of staff and rotation
  • High reproducibility and repeatability
  • Unique adaptive features treat cells individually, just like manual patch clamp

Also, the unique design of the QPlates ensures consistent quality recordings time after time.

  • Fast and complete liquid exchange via microfluidic channels
  • Glass surfaces to prevent adherence of sticky compounds
  • Ready-to-use individual electrode pairs – no need to ever re-chloride electrodes again
See all publications with QPatch

Key QPatch functionalities

Adaptive whole-cell protocols

All cells are different, and they should be treated accordingly. QPatch includes individual whole-cell protocols to increase whole-cell rates and, ultimately, the success rate for your experiment. Read more

Adaptive current clamp

The main challenge with current clamp on automated patch clamp platforms is the variation in sealing and resting membrane potential from cell to cell. This makes it impossible to design one current clamp protocol to work on all cells. We have solved that with our unique Adaptive Current Clamp feature. Read more

Adaptive voltage clamp

Optimize voltage clamp protocols individually for each cell’s electrical properties. The QPatch system will automatically perform Boltzmann fits for each cell online. This is to estimate the cell-specific voltage needed to activate X% of the receptor population or the voltage that keeps X% of the cells in an inactivated state. Read more

Temperature control

With the temperature control add-on, you can perform experiments at controlled physiological temperatures. Thereby reducing fluctuations caused by temperature changes in your laboratory environment, thus ensuring higher repeatability and reproducibility. Read more

Rs compensation

Series resistance compensation for fast-activating ion channels can help remove voltage clamp errors and improve clamp accuracy. All Sophion’s patch-clamp amplifiers utilize a patented technology enabling up to 100% Rs compensation. Read more

Sophion Analyzer software

Advanced and customized analysis of your data can be performed immediately after your data has been collected. Sophion Analyzer can analyze thousands of data points automatically and present the results according to your requirements. Read more

QPatch Commander

Create customized protocols in the intuitive QPatch instrument software and let QPatch take care of your liquid handling. With QPatch, it is possible to make serial dilutions or to retrieve waste samples for further downstream analysis. Read more

QPlate microflow-based glass consumables using single & multi-hole technology

QPlates are based on microfluidic principles to ensure fast and complete liquid exchange, pre-defined compound concentration, and low compound consumption. Our QPlates come with one patch hole per measurement site or ten patch holes per measurement site. Read more

Contact us to learn more

  • "For manual patch clamping, you have to practice your skills and techniques before you can generate data. It can take months before you can start generating actual usable data for grants or papers or similar purposes. Today, with QPatch, you could potentially start running it after a day of training."

    Soomin Song, PhD, Assistant Professor and Manager of the IonLab

  • "Our collaboration with Sophion and access to their expertise is a real-world example of what you can achieve with automated patch clamping and an expert supplier."

    Fredrik Elinder, Professor, Linköping University, Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences, Division of Neurobiology

  • "Using a QPatch or Qube is fairly simple. You can train someone up very quickly, within half a day, to use the instrument. In a few more days, they can generate data, conduct analysis, use the software and plot their data. "

    Gary Clark, PhD, Metrion Biosciences, Director of Screening Technologies

  • "In the past, if I was lucky, I could fully test one compound for full dose responses on one ion channel in one day. Now I can test eight compounds on three ion channels and get full dose responses. It’s a huge difference."

    Nina Ottosson, Senior Research Coordinator, Linköping University, Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences, Division of Neurobiology

  • "We use the Sophion Analyzer software every day to check the quality of our cells and the variability of the results. This is important to decide if further re-runs or adaptations are necessary."

    Simon Hebeisen, PhD, B’SYS GmbH, CSO

  • "Today, we can run experiments much faster, and open the field of electrophysiology to a wider group of people. Working with Sophion has been really great."

    Soomin Song, PhD, Assistant Professor and Manager of the IonLab

Sophion customer case stories

With the help of our automated patch clamp solutions, we have asked our customers how they use the technology to shape their future.

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