Biorepository

To maintain safety and sterility, samples are handled in a laminar flow biosafety cabinet in the main laboratory, frozen section room and in the ancillary COVID-19 laboratory.

Digital slide scanning is carried out using the Leica Aperio Versa. The wide range of objective lenses and motorized nose piece for automatic changing, enables scanning of slides at their ideal resolution. Slides can be scanned anywhere from 0.9mm to 1.2mm thickness, with scan times of 206 secs for 15x15mm at 20x. With the 200-slide robotic slide loader, up to 200 slides may be scanned in one session. Scanned images of appropriate resolution are uploaded to Augusta University Box for secure access and storage. Files in .scn format may be viewed using Aperio ImageScope software from Leica.

Surgical samples transported directly from the OR are reviewed by a pathologists’ assistant or by a resident pathologist and ensuring specimen integrity for diagnosis, suitable samples are dissected and provided to biorepository personnel.  These samples are annotated and further dissected to provide multiple aliquots that can be flash-frozen or fixed in formalin for subsequent processing and distribution for translational research.

The MVE Series of cryogenic freezers is perfect for the Life Sciences. With enough storage capacity for up to 39,000 1.2/2.0 ml vials, there’s plenty of room for your valuable samples. And with MVE’s 60 years of expertise in manufacturing open-top models like this, you’ll have complete peace of mind that your precious contents will remain viable and protected.

The TMA Grandmaster is a fully automated tissue microarray production platform with high capacity and high throughput. TMAs are produced by transfer of small tissue cores from a single patient block into a ‘recipient’ block with multiple arrays in parallel. Once generated, multiple tissues are arrayed on a single paraffin block and can be reproducibly interrogated with immunohistochemistry or in situ technologies. The construction of conventional TMAs is labor intensive, imprecise, and time-consuming. The use of an automated tissue microarray system such as the TMA Grand Master is a state-of-the-art solution to improve efficiency, reproducibility and quality. The TMA Grandmaster allows size and spatial flexibility with core diameters ranging from 0.6 mm to 2.0 mm, automated block image control and automated PCR extraction functions.

The Vectra 3 Multispectral Imaging system is an automated brightfield and fluorescence digital scanning microscope. Vectra’s automated, high-throughput imaging capabilities make it an ideal system to extract proteomic and morphometric information from intact tissue sections. The Vectra provides automated slide-handling via a 200-slide robotic slide-loader, brightfield and multispectral imaging technology and pattern recognition-based image analysis software. The system can identify nuclei with DAPI staining and superimpose up to 6 additional fluorophore-conjugated markers. Software algorithms can detect intensity and spatial information to quantitatively evaluate the tissue microenvironment. The Vectra3 is ideal for pre-clinical and clinical trial assessment.