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news.Ventana Medical Systems, a member of the Roche Group, has introduced a fully-automated staining technique, which helps researchers to examine miRNAs and proteins related to cancer in the same section of tumor tissue.
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Detecting miRNAs and proteins together will enable researchers to visualize the association of oncogenic protein expression to those miRNAs involved in the regulation of the mRNA species responsible for protein production, according to the company.
Ventana Medical Systems founder Thomas Grogan said "With this exciting technical breakthrough, we can now judge with a standard light microscope the link between miRNA and associated proteins in full cellular context."
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center Department of Radiology assistant professor James Welsh said, "In lung cancer, we’ve begun to identify pairs of miRNAs and proteins that we believe play a role in treatment resistance and metastasis; utilizing this new protocol will hopefully allow us to better understand the correlation between the two."
Welsh further added that in the future miRNAs could be utilized as biomarkers or therapeutics for lung cancer as well as other solid tumors.
The new technique developed to be used on the DISCOVERY ULTRA, uses non-enzymatic pre-treatments, which enables to detect both targets while preserving tissue morphology.