Dr Juan Rosai of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center showed us at the
Society for Applied Immunohistochemistry a type of home- made (I believe)
trephine like punch approx 5-6mm in inside diameter that they used to
create these multi-tissue blocks.  All you need is a cylindrical or tubular
piece of metal whose edge can be sharpened, not necessarily razor sharp,
and a thinner piece of metal (or wood or whatever) that fits inside this
tube to push the core of paraffin embedded tissue out of the trephine. To
obtain the core, you twist and press the trephine into the part of the
block that you want and it removes a core.  These cores can then be
labelled and saved and are embedded together once you have accumulated all
of the samples that you wish to include in your multitissue block.  Keep a
record and embed them in straight rows and you have a wonderful tool to
evaluate new antibodies. They used 40 tissues in their tumor blocks, ten
columns, 4 rows.

Jeff Silverman Southampton NY


----------
> From: brandon <schanbacher.2@osu.edu>
> To: histonet@pathology.swmed.edu
> Subject: Parrafin core samples
> Date: Friday, January 22, 1999 4:00 PM
>
> I've recently heard of a device which takes core punches out of a
paraffin
> blocks and  re-embeds them into a single block, resulting in a paraffin
> block containing multiple samples.  Unfortunately, this was only
mentioned
> in passing and I have no other information about it.  If anyone knows
> anything about this type of device, particularly any vendors, etc..., I
> would appreciate it.  Private reply is fine.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Brandon Schanbacher
> schanbacher.2@osu.edu
> Ohio State University
> Division of Pharmacology
>