No-cost Manual Method for Preparation of Tissue Microarrays Having High Quality Comparable to Semiautomated Methods

High Quality Tissue Miniarray Technique Using a Conventional TV/Radio Telescopic Antenna

“…However, the expensive array construction and high cost of commercial array equipments, have been restricted the global use of this technique worldwide. Many researchers in developing countries made efforts to overcome the high cost, through in-house manual construction of high-density TMAs (Shebl et al, 2011;Choi et al, 2012;Foda, 2013;Kim et al, 2013). However, minor drawbacks including, variable degrees of section distortion, small tissue core size, irregular cutting plane and loss of the tissue cores can occur during cutting of the TMAs, posing technical problems for in-house manual construction of TMAs (Eckel-Passow et al, 2010;Foda, 2013).…”

“…While these 42 cases in other techniques would be represented by TMA block containing 0.6-mm x 126 small tissue cores (three cores per case) with the disadvantage of inadequate stroma and core loss. Many researchers reported up to 20% core loss during sectioning and (B) HER2 amplification measured by silver-enhanced in situ hybridization in breast cancer staining in TMA techniques with large number of small cores (Foda, 2013;Kim et al, 2013). It was also difficult to study facet of tumor biology such as interactions between the tumor and its stroma as these stromal components may not be adequately represented in small cores (Singh and Sau, 2010;Foda, 2013).…”

“…Many researchers reported up to 20% core loss during sectioning and (B) HER2 amplification measured by silver-enhanced in situ hybridization in breast cancer staining in TMA techniques with large number of small cores (Foda, 2013;Kim et al, 2013). It was also difficult to study facet of tumor biology such as interactions between the tumor and its stroma as these stromal components may not be adequately represented in small cores (Singh and Sau, 2010;Foda, 2013). Our technique could overcome this problem and there was no loss of any tissue cores during cutting or staining processes as the cores were large and incorporated very well in the TmA blocks.…”

“…Several efforts have been made by many researchers in the last 15 years, to develop and improve the output of the TMA technique. The specialized commercial automated and semi-automated equipments as well as the inexpensive simple manual tissue array methods have been used to construct the TMA blocks (Faratian et al, 2009;Veek and Dahl, 2010;Fowler et al, 2011;Foda, 2013). However, up till now, the productivity of TMA has been restricted in developing countries allover the world due to the costs of available arrayers and technical difficulties of routine array construction (Shebl et al, 2011;Choi et al, 2012).…”

“…The small size of TMA cores may not be representative of the whole heterogeneous cancers and may not provide enough data about the entire tissue profile (Eckel-Passow et al, 2010;Kim et al, 2013). Also, sectioning difficulties, irregular cutting plane due to variable thickness of donor paraffin blocks, core losses and instability of the TMA blocks are commonly reported problems in routine TMA (Foda, 2013). So, this study was carried out in order to overcome these drawbacks and develop an easy economical method for construction of self-made manual TmAs with variable tissue formats.…”