Manchester: measuring cell heartbeat to improve drug discovery

Development opportunity

Researchers at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, have devised a method of detecting the electrical equivalent of a living cell’s last gasp. The work opens up a new way to test drugs in vitro.

The aim is to make the system sensitive enough to measure all movements of ions in and out of a cell, in effect producing a “cellular cardiogram” that would allow the functioning of the cell to be monitored in a similar fashion to the way a cardiograph records the activity of a human heart.

“Once we know the average or usual pattern of electrical activity in a cell, we can see how different drugs affect it,” says Professor Andre Geim. This type of testing could be used in advance of preclinical animal tests.  he electrical activity test could be applied also to monitor the effects of pollution on naturally occurring micro-organisms in the environment.

To measure a cell’s normal activity, Geim and fellow researchers modified apparatus used  to detect weak magnetic fields in superconductors. Unfortunately, these modifications made the technique less sensitive, and the normal activity of the cells could not be detected. But when they added ethanol, which increases the transparency of cellular membranes, they could detect the signal.

In effect, the researchers were measuring “the last gasp of the dying cell”, says Geim. Although not the cardiogram hoped for, the electrical signal was the smallest yet detected from a living cell, at around 100 times smaller than anything measured previously. This amounted to measuring an electrical current of just 10 moving electrons.

This provides the confidence that equipment sensitive enough to measure a cell’s heartbeat can be developed.

“We already have some ideas about how to improve the sensitivity of the detector,” says Geim. “Probably, the most important outcome is that we defined an important goal. Cellular cardiograms can no longer be seen as absurd or science-fictional.”