Irritable bowel disease, Crohn's disease, and Barrett's esophagus are just some of the gastrointestinal diseases that often require biopsy or tissue samples to be taken from the gastrointestinal tract. Often, a large number of biopsy samples must be taken from various locations in the gastrointestinal tract in order to properly diagnose the disease.
Various current biopsy forceps, however, are designed to take only one or two samples in a single pass. Thus, during procedures that require many more tissue samples, up to as many as twenty or more samples in some cases, the forceps must be advanced into and retracted out of the gastrointestinal tract numerous times. Such advancing and retracting of the forceps is time consuming, can cause trauma to the surrounding tissue, and can create sterility issues. Accordingly, a device that minimizes the number of advancements and retractions of the forceps by acquiring and storing multiple biopsy samples in a single pass is desirable. Also desirable is a device that is relatively easy to produce and assemble.