Webinars & Presentations Webinar: Unlocking the Potential of Electroporation for Studying Ion Channel-Related Disorders and iPSCs

Webinar: Unlocking the Potential of Electroporation for Studying Ion Channel-Related Disorders and iPSCs

This webinar was broadcasted live on December 19, 2023.

Genetic disorders such as cystic fibrosis and long QT syndrome are caused by mutations in human ion channel and ion transporter genes. Electroporation is a non-viral transfection technique increasingly used to study these disorders. Electric pulses cause transient permeability in cell membranes allowing scientists to introduce genetic material, creating stable cell lines with desired traits, or delivering therapeutic genes into target cells. However, factors such as cell type and cell viability can affect successful delivery and inability to scale could compromise clinical translation.

In this GEN webinar, Dr. Alfred George discusses an electroporation approach that addresses efficiency challenges and engineers target cells at unprecedented scale. He also discusses MaxCyte electroporation and how it was used to express human ion channel variants in cultured mammalian cells to enable high throughput automated patch clamp recording. The MaxCyte STx enabled functional evaluation of ion channel variants without requiring stable cell line creation. You’ll learn how to use electroporation to create or correct mutations in induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) for modeling human genetic diseases and providing proof of concept for gene therapy.

Speaker

Al George headshot 2023

Alfred L. George, Jr.

MD Professor and Chair Department of Pharmacology Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

Dr. George is a pioneer in elucidating the genetics and pathogenesis of channelopathies—disorders caused by mutations in ion channel genes. His work focuses on genetic disorders caused by voltage-gated ion channel mutations that are responsible for disorders of membrane excitability including diseases affecting muscle, heart and brain that result in abnormal muscle contraction, cardiac arrhythmias, sudden death, epilepsy and related neurodevelopmental disorders. Throughout his career, he has made enduring contributions to the field of channelopathy that have revealed the genetic basis for several disorders, clarified the functional consequences of dozens of mutant ion channels, and helped translate discoveries into new therapeutic strategies for these orphan diseases.

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