Laser capture microdissection (LCM) and the future of molecular pathology

With the revolution in molecular biology and its application to the understanding of human disease, one stands at the threshold of a new era of molecular medicine which offers more specific and effective therapies based on sophisticated molecular diagnosis of an individual patient´s disease. Laser capture microdissection (LCM) has been developed to provide a rapid, reliable method to procure pure populations of targeted cells from specific microscopic regions of tissue sections for subsequent molecular analysis. Initially LCM is being used by the research community in order to understand the complex molecular changes in normal development and in the progression of disease pathologies. In the longer term, one is rapidly developing means of integrating LCM with molecular analysis techniques in order to provide a future technology for routine molecular diagnosis of clinical specimens