The biggest news these days in tissue microarrays (TMAs) may be that this former "next big thing" has become a standard tool for molecular profiling of disease. Some 682 papers have been published on TMAs, according to the ISI Web of Science, two-thirds of them on cancer. The technology has helped move at least one biomarker – racemase, for prostate cancer – into the clinic. Their usefulness for gene marker validation is broadly accepted, and some in the field see TMAs as platforms for multimarker discovery in their own right.
"What's most exciting for me as a pathologist who does a lot of molecular epidemiology-type studies, biomarker studies, is [that] the TMAs have just become accepted as a standard way of starting to do the testing and validation work," says Mark Rubin, associate professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School. In the early years, Rubin says, TMA advocates spent a ...
