Imaging mass cytometry (IMC) enables deep, single-cell interrogation of cell phenotypes, cell-cell interactions and spatial proximity within normal and diseased tissues.

Hyperion can image tissue sections stained with up to 40 metal-containing reagents at 1 micron resolution, comparable to light microscopy, but with much higher content. Detecting markers with metal tagged Abs provides uniform staining with minimal background and no autofluorescence.

See examples of our IMC data for normal mouse tissues (spleen, thymus and small intestine), tumor immune profiling (mouse mammary gland and brain) and human tonsil.

We can perform small-scale IMC pilots on your sections cut from freshly frozen or formaldeyde-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues. We will stain them with our validated metal-tagged IMC Ab panels for mouse frozen, mouse FFPE  or human FFPE.

Contact Tina Chen with any questions, for a cost estimate and/or to schedule your pilot study.

IMC Services

This DIY option is for labs who have invested in their own reagents and have the trained staff to perform upstream sample preparation and labelling for IMC. We will scan one or more regions of interest (750-1500 uM2) on your stained slides, academic pricing below (booked through iLab).

  • Acquisition set-up fee is $75 per slide (including ROI selection and acquisition software set-up)
  • Acquisition fee is $90/hr, charged by the total ablation time
    • Approx Hyperion run times by ROI size (in um^2)
      • 750: 1h
      • 1000: 2h
      • 1250: 3h
      • 1500: 4h

Download templates required for booking acquisition time:

CASCA_slide_tissue_mounting_ guide/howto

IMC Submitted slide annotation_Blank

IMC_Acq_Panel_blank

Clients will receive the original .mcd file generated by the acquisition software. MCD viewer software is available free of charge from SBI for a simple and quick visualization of the acquired data. In addition, clients can request for data pre-processing service where we export single channel 32-bit .tiff files from the raw .mcd data file and apply CASCA pre-processing script to remove noise and outliers.  Pre-processed files are suitable for cell segmentation or other downstream algorithmic workflows.

Contact Tina Chen for a consultation.