Objective

Effective drug discovery for new therapies for pain is constrained by the difficulty associated with isolating primary neural cells in sufficient quantities and quality necessary for routine high-throughput screening campaigns. Advances in stem cell biology, have enabled an increased use of pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) in the efforts to perform experiments in an appropriate cellular context, specifically there has been significant investment in the use of patient derived induced PSC lines that carry a distinct mutation. We successfully developed a robust phenotypic assay, with patient derived iPSC, measuring neuronal excitability in the microwell format necessary for screens. The multielectrode assay, used to monitor neuronal function, was validated with an annotated compound library confirming the suitability of patient derived iPSC derived sensory neurons for drug-screening activities.