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Axon Instruments Ships 20th PatchXpress System

Wednesday, February 25, 2004

UNION CITY, Calif., Feb. 25 /PRNewswire/ -- Drug discovery instrumentation maker, Axon Instruments, Inc. today announced the achievement of an important milestone with the shipment of its 20th PatchXpress(TM) 7000A automated parallel patch-clamp system.

The PatchXpress 7000A, with exclusive use of the Sealchip16(TM) planar electrode from Aviva Biosciences Corp., is the world's first commercially available automated planar patch-clamp workstation for true, tight-seal whole-cell voltage clamp. It automates the patch-clamp technique to screen drug libraries for compounds that act on ion-channel targets, allowing hundreds of compounds to be tested with minimal user intervention.

Ion channels are implicated in pain, stroke, epilepsy, diabetes and high blood pressure. Replacing fast but less reliable high-throughput techniques, and accurate but slow manual testing, the PatchXpress substantially increases the rate at which lead compounds can be validated and optimized. The increased efficiency provided by the PatchXpress is crucial for drug discovery companies in their attempts to bring new drugs to market in a cost effective and timely manner. In addition, PatchXpress plays a leading role in testing the cardiac safety profile of lead compounds of any type.

Axon's PatchXpress 7000A customers include some of the top pharmaceutical, biotech, and safety-screening companies in the world. Dr. Alan Finkel, Axon Instruments' CEO stated, "When we shipped our first PatchXpress in September 2003, we knew that we had produced a revolutionary product that would significantly enhance the efficiency of our customers' drug discovery and safety testing processes. With 20 units shipped in only five months, and a significant number of orders in the pipeline, we are very satisfied that we have succeeded in our product goals and we are excited about the future of the PatchXpress product line."

Bernard Fermini, Ph.D, a Principal Research Investigator at Pfizer, and one of the first PatchXpress customers stated, "The addition of the PatchXpress 7000A to our lab has enhanced our ability to test significantly more compounds in less time, while freeing up our Ph.D-level researchers to focus on the drugs shown to have the greatest potential for the marketplace."

About Axon Instruments

Axon Instruments, Inc., (www.axon.com) produces a broad spectrum of instrumentation and software for cellular neurosciences, genomics, and cell-based screening. In cellular neurosciences and genomics, Axon is widely recognized as one of the world's pre-eminent manufacturers of drug discovery instrumentation. The company's goal is to produce a range of superior yet affordable instrument and software systems for drug discovery aimed at the pharmaceutical industry, biotechnology companies, and academic researchers. Founded in 1983 and located in Union City, California and Melbourne, Australia, Axon Instruments is a California corporation listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (symbol: AXN.AX).

In neurosciences, Axon Instruments' patch clamp amplifiers and software are used to study such conditions as anxiety, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, heart disease, neuropathic pain, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, cystic fibrosis and migraine. Axon's GenePix microarray readers and Acuity microarray bioinformatics software are used for fundamental genomics research worldwide, as well as for the study of diseases such as cancer, asthma, and malaria, and the identification of unknown pathogens such as SARS. In the realm of high-throughput screening, Axon's OpusXpress automated oocyte screening system and PatchXpress automated patch clamp are established in pharmaceutical companies eager to increase the throughput of their drug discovery programs, while Axon's ImageXpress high-speed image-based screening system is finding applications in stem cell research and fluorescent drug-screening assays for a range of cellular functions such as apoptosis, cell viability, cell classification and counting, neurite outgrowth, cytoskeletal rearrangements, subcellular localization, molecular co-localization, intracellular tracking and receptor translocation.

SOURCE Axon Instruments, Inc.

CONTACT: Dr. Chris Mathes, Product Line Manager, HTE Patch-Clamp Systems, of Axon Instruments, Inc., +1-510-675-6200, or chrism@axon.com