As we learned, the benefits of long-term preservation and ease of storage offered by these samples come at the cost of difficulty in accessing the nucleic acid and damage to the nucleic acid itself.

Pros and cons of FFPE

Our sense from these early conversations was that the use of FFPE samples was not going to decline anytime soon. They are a valuable resource in several areas of research including oncology, hematology, and immunology. They are also a limited resource in many cases. Certain FFPE sample cohorts can be highly informative in drug and diagnostic development and as a finite resource can be very expensive to access. The ability to extract more DNA from a given amount of FFPE tissue would expand the utility of such cohorts. Finally, extraction of nucleic acids from FFPE blocks is not simple and the results can be highly variable.

Getting more out of FFPE with the Ionic system

This feedback gave us our first challenge to take on with our first product, the Ionic system.. Our objective was to not only improve the quality and quantity the of nucleic acid produced by using the Ionic system, but to also improve the reliability of our results and simplify the entire workflow, from raw section or scroll to purified nucleic acid. After developing our FFPE to Pure DNA kit, we performed a series of experiments to convince ourselves that we had accomplished our goals and decided to share that in our first white paper. Please click the white paper image on the left to check it out.

Purigen Proof-of-Performance program

If you want to see similar results for your FFPE samples, click here to fill out a request form to find out about our Proof-of-Performance program.