TMA Grand Master - Tissue Microarrayer

Overview

The TMA Grand Master is the fastest, highest-capacity and most user-friendly tissue microarrayer on the market.

It is an automated and sophisticated tissue microarrayer, allowing the precise selection and extraction of specific regions of interest on the donor blocks and their insertion in recipient blocks.

The TMA Grand Master elevates the tissue microarray workflow to a new level. With its high capacity, high speed and advanced features it is finally possible to create high-density and high-quality TMAs in a standardized way. Thanks to the clever hardware design, the block loading, block imaging, and arraying are parallel processes. Therefore, the TMA Grand Master can be loaded with new blocks continuously, even during the arraying process.

By using TMA Grand Master you can easily and quickly create TMA blocks with great precision, of 0.6, 1, 1.5 and 2 mm diameter tissue cores. Optionally, the instrument can also extract tissue samples to standard 0.2 ml PCR tubes. Then, the extracted tissue samples can be used later for various applications at the field of molecular pathology.

TMA Grand Master prepares TMA blocks from biological specimens and samples of human or animal tissues. Typical applications include, but are not limited to the following:

• Laboratories at hospitals and clinics
• Pathology departments at hospitals and clinics
• Biobanks
• Research centers, in particular cancer research centers
• Pharmaceutical companies
• Toxico-pathology laboratories

This easy-to-use device is one of the most advanced tissue microarrayers on the market with a unique feature set.

Key Features

Fully automated control  

The TMA Grand Master is the fastest, highest-capacity fully automated tissue microarrayer on the market.

High capacity: 72 blocks

• 60 donor blocks at the same time
• 12 recipient blocks

4 core diameters

• 0.6 mm (maximum number of cores/TMA block is 558)
• 1 mm (maximum number of cores/TMA block is 286)
• 1.5 mm (maximum number of cores/TMA block is 135)
• 2 mm (maximum number of cores/TMA block is 84)

Fast operation

• Maximum 12 seconds per core
• Simultaneous loading, imaging, drilling and punching

Smart automation

• Automatic block height measurement to ensure the embedded cores are in alignment with the recipient block surface
• Fully automated barcode reading
• Automatic donor block and label image saving for reference
• Automatic project data saving into database

PCR extraction function

•  6 PCR cassettes

•  10 PCR tubes / cassette
•  Use of cleaning block to avoid cross contamination
•  Extracted FFPE tissue samples are ready for DNA extraction and PCR analysis with commercially available kits

Other features

• Custom recipient block design and production
• Ability to create up to 12 identical TMA blocks
• Digital slide overlay for more precise tissue core (sample) selection
• Ability to import clinical data
• TMA data export in various file formats (ods, xls, xlsx, csv, xml)

Software

TMA Grand Master is controlled by the latest version of the TMA Control software. This software is the best solution for TMA block design and creation. It has advanced features for layout design and tissue core selection. A fully automated tool for overlapping an annotated digital slide with the donor block image helps precise core selection. During the TMA project the software automatically saves all the TMA data, which will be an invaluable source of information during TMA slide analysis by TMA Module software.

Specifications