We had a different problem, but the approach might be helpful depending on the characteristics of your material . We embedded the tissue in Methacrylate and used a regular microtome to cut sections with a tungsten carbide blade. We were able to immunostain those sections.

See the paper below for details. Good luck.

Immunohistochemical Identification of Lymphocyte Antigens Using a Modified Methacrylate Method Adapted for Standard Microtomes

Article Mar 2003 Kenneth C Bagley, Sayed Abdelwahab, Robert G Tuskan[...]Frank Denaro

As mentioned, embedding in plastic (metacrylate) and cutting with a microtome and tungsten blade would be the logical choice, providing that the size of the material is not too big (the bigger it is, the harder it will be to cut).  IHC can be done on metacrylate-embedded samples, but the necessary deplastination step can be hard on the tissues, and so whether IHC will work depends on the marker you want to detect; some will work, some won't. There are some commecially-available metacrylate kits that are sold as being more IHC-friendly.

thanks for your replies! I thought about the same, but the histology technicians told me that IHC is NOT possible at all after plastic embedding. they also said many standard stainings won't work properly. hence my question.

But i will have a look into the "IHC-friendly" plastic version.

thank you!

It's true that some markers will not work, but some will. vWF for endothelium worked OK after MMA deplastination, for instance.

Note that when talking about methacrylate, there are two broad categories,  MMA (methyl-) and GMA (glycol-). From what I remember, you could either use MMA and then deplastinate before staining, or use GMA and not deplastinate. However GMA is often not hard enough for embedding metallic materials, and our lab's trials at doing IHC on GMA sections yielded very messy results.

Look up Technovit 9100 for a more IHC-friendly MMA resin kit.