Switzerland-based pharmaceuticals and diagnostics developer Roche Diagnostics has signed a deal with analytical laboratory instruments manufacturer AvanSci Bio to acquire its tissue dissection technology.
As part of the deal, Roche will gain access to AvanSci Bio’s all products associated with the high performance microdissection of slide mounted tissue sections.
The system comprises instrumentation, software and consumables deployed by researchers and clinicians to take out particular areas of tissue with high accuracy for successive molecular analysis such as real time PCR, microarrays and sequencing.
Roche Tissue Diagnostics and Sequencing Solutions head Dan Zabrowski said: "This innovative system will expand our diagnostic tool kit allowing us to link the diagnostic hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stain with sequencing analysis through high quality sample preparation.
"It will also enable us to meet the critical challenge of tumor heterogeneity."
The company’s patent-pending technology also includes the automated MilliSect instrument, which is claimed to be very reasonable than manual dissection techniques and laser microdissection systems.
To be tested at select consumer sites in 2015 under a wider development programme for a future generation instrument, the MilliSect’s high specificity and quality enables a more than 90% tumour enriched sample for molecular study.
Using the information about tissue context and spatial relationships and tumour heterogeneity, researchers and clinicians will be able to pinpoint and extract more accurate regions of interest within the tissue, delivering clean samples of required quantity for sequencing use.