As summer sets & autumnal mists roll in, the latest quarterly summary of Sophion user publications is upon us. Q3 saw another busy few months for Sophion platforms out in the wilds of ion channel research.

Many of the usual suspects are covered, so you will surely find something that catches your eye: Nav, Kv, Cav, ligand-gated ion channels; neurological disorders, cancer, infectious diseases; safety pharmacology, through to venoms and antivenoms.

From the list of great publications here are three more unusual, intriguing developments:

• Vaelli et al. of Prof. Bruce Bean’s lab at Harvard published the first ever QPatch Compact paper, using our latest planar patch platform to characterize VX-150 and VX-548 – two of Vertex’s pain therapeutics targeting Nav1.8 which show promise in the clinic. Read the paper here
• We have been waiting for an ion channel paper on Machine Learning (ML) and now four have arrived:

1) Mateos et al., UC Davis, used ML methods to accelerate VGIC drug discovery and development. Read the paper here

2) Liu et al., a US FDA collaboration, developed ML models for hERG block predictions. Read the paper here

3) Li et al., China Pharmaceutical University, Nanjing, attempted to design polypharmacological drugs, drugs that aim to modulate multiple targets in a disease. Read the paper here

4) Rafaelli et al., a collaboration between James Cook University, CNRS, and the University of Queensland, used the protein folding ML software AlphaFold alongside NMR providing data for improved predictive models. Read the paper here

• Two papers addressing the increasing global problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) leading to more multi-drug resistant (MDR) pathogens:

1) Hameed et al., Bugworks Research India, Apconix and MedChemica, developed BWC0977, a broad-spectrum antibacterial clinical candidate. Read the paper here

2) Kofoed et al., Genentech, suggest GuaB inhibitors as a novel class of bacteriacidals that may lead to improved treatment MDR infections. Read the paper here

Congratulations to all authors that have published in this latest quarter.