Patent ID: 8709804

Claim:
A method of identifying a drug that modulates ion oscillation based upon its effect on ion oscillation in a cell, comprising: i. providing a cell sample; ii. providing a means of imaging the cell sample; iii. administering the drug to said sample, wherein the drug's potential to modulate ion oscillation is unknown prior to administering it to the sample; iv. imaging said sample with said means for an interval of time to create a series of images of an ion oscillation response to said drug; v. repeating steps i-iv at least five times using different doses of said drug for each repetition; vi. measuring the ion oscillation from said images; vii. plotting said oscillation for each dose to create an oscillation plot for each single cell of said sample; and viii. transforming said plots into a dose-response curve for each single cell of said sample; ix. analyzing the dose-response curves and/or oscillation plots to determine the effect of each dose of the drug on ion flux in the cells, wherein individual cell responses are used to determine a minimum and a maximum dose of a response, and an average slope and IC 50 value are from the sum of disparate individual responses; and x. determining that the drug modulates ion oscillation if ion flux is detected, and determining that the drug does not modulate ion oscillation if ion flux is not detected.