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Overview:
Understanding the molecular causes and progression of diseases (e.g. cancer, inflammatory bowel diseases, liver cirrhosis etc.) is very useful to biomedical scientists and healthcare providers to identify and validate targeted biomarkers that will help them tailor suitable treatment plan for patients and make informed decisions about lifestyle changes and quality of life.
In addition to characterization of the histopathological features in disease, the GenaTi Tissue & Pathology Research Services (GTPRS) will support researchers and students in the discovery and validation of biomarkers. These biomarkers are crucial to enable understanding of the cellular and molecular processes which in turn will facilitate better patient management. GTPRS offers various types of services to help identification of the following type of biomarkers:
Offered services:
Susceptibility biomarkers which help to predict the likelihood of the onset of the disease.
Diagnostic biomarkers which help in diagnosing the disease.
Prognostic biomarkers which help to predict the disease outcome especially in cancer, including survival; the chances of complete recovery or the possibility of recurrence.
Predictive biomarkers which inform about the treatment’s response.
Tissue Micro Arrays (TMA):
The GenaTi Tissue & Pathology Research Services (GTPRS) offer Tissue microarray (TMA) slides for scientists and healthcare researchers. TMA is one of the most revolutionary technologies introduced into research and pathology laboratories in the past decade. It is based on the idea of applying miniaturization and a high throughput approach for tissue analysis. TMA is a method of harvesting small disks of tissue from a range of standard histological sections and placing them in an array on a recipient paraffin block such that hundreds of cases can be analyzed simultaneously saving money and time. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the "TMA” technique is still not widely used in most laboratories providing pathology services despite its significant contribution in speeding up biomarkers discovery, reducing experimental expenses and better management of both time and biological samples.
TMA technology is amenable to a variety of techniques, such as histochemistry, immunohistochemical staining, and Florescence in situ hybridization (FISH). For each protocol the whole cohort will be subjected to the same variables and treated in the same manner allowing the simultaneous analysis of thousands of human tissue samples in a single experiment under uniform conditions. TMAs are ideally suited for further validation of data regarding individual genes of particular clinical relevance detected by high throughput molecular profiling tools. It is a recommended technology to generate a plethora of new data in a relatively short time, which will deliver diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic clues in human diseases.
Custom-TMAs is relatively a recent approach to drive a hypothesis-driven biomarker discovery in oncogenomics. The GenaTi Tissue & Pathology Research Services (GTPRS) offer the following available or on-demand Custom-TMAs:
Single-Tumor Arrays, featuring a single sample based on the tumor type, (e.g. breast cancer, colorectal cancer, ovarian cancer, etc.)
Multi-tumor Arrays, featuring multiple samples from multiple patients, representing multiple tumor types (e.g., colon cancers, lung cancers, and prostate cancers), all in one block
Outcome Arrays, which may contain samples from similar histologic types of a disease, but from patients who have had different clinical outcomes (e.g., responders vs. non-responders to a particular therapy).
Customized Tumor Arrays, designed and constructed based on specific requests (e.g. tumor grade based, early onset based, gender based, tumor localization based, etc.)
Offered services:
Processing of human and non-human tissue samples including tissue
fixation, processing, embedding, construction of paraffin blocks, cutting, slidepreparation and staining.
Identification of archival paraffin-embedded specimens
Evaluation of
novel biomarkers/antibodies using multiplex medium throughput Immunohistochemistry (up to 30 slides / run)
Immunohistochemical staining using conventional and novel antibodies
Interpretation of immunohistochemistry results by expert pathologists
Available platforms:
Cassette Labeler
TBS SHUR/Wave™ Laboratory Microwave
Tissue Processor
Automated immunostainer (BenchMark XT, Ventana® Medical systems
Inc., Tucson, AZ, USA).
Tissue Micro Array Master 3D Histech, EU.