美国Beecher Instruments  www.beecherinstruments.com
Beecher公司是一家专业生产组织芯片点样仪的元老级的公司
Beecher Instruments develops genomic and proteomic research tools. Beecher has pioneered tissue microarray instrumentation, and it holds several issued and pending patents for tissue arrayer designs. Before tissue arrays were developed, the conventional method for tissue analysis involved pathologists and histologists studying specimens one section, one slide at a time. The advantages of being able to stain and interpret multiple specimens in one slide are rather obvious, and reseachers have indeed used different methods (for example, construction of "sausage" blocks) for producing multi-tissue slides well before the development of the modern tissue microarray approach. However, the old multi-tissue block methods were time consuming, damaged the original tissue blocks and did not allow for generation of blocks with many specimens. As a result, multi-tissue blocks remained in limited use.

Beecher introduced the original manual tissue arrayer in 1998. With this instrument it was now possible for the first time to make precisely ordered arrays of hundreds of tissue specimens. These arrays were so small that sampling did not damage the original tissue blocks, yet the spots were large enough to provide a representative view of the tissue morphology. Since then, the tissue microarray approach has become increasingly popular for a variety of applications including antibody testing and diagnostic marker evaluation in clinical patient materials. Hundreds of scientific research papers now refererence the use of tissue arrays or tissue microarrays as a part of the materials and methods.

Beecher has continued to improve tissue microarray technology. The ATA-27 automated arrayer is designed for making construction of high-density tissue microarray blocks fast, accurate and reliable. The system features a software interface for array design, specimen tracking, region-of-interest selection, and it has multiple adjustable options to configure array construction to match practically any specimen type and tissue cassette size. The MTA-II product line brings convenience and innovative design to manual array construction. See Arrayers and Accessories for description of different tissue microarray products.

Several other innovative research solutions are currently being tested at Beecher. Image analysis has been a bottleneck in tissue microarray laboratory workflow, and Beecher has recently introduced image analysis applications that enable completely automated TMA analysis. These applications can also be used to analyze traditional tissue sections.

We believe that cellular gene and protein expresssion data are crucial for advancing biomedical knowledge, and continue to develop technology to facilitate such research.