There is the issue about cell-lines vs fresh cells. Cell-lines have always played, and continue to play, an important role in drug screening and drug development.
The problem is that cell-lines do not predict for disease or patient specific drug effects. If you can kill cancer cell-lines with a given drug, it doesn’t tell you anything about how the drug will work in real world, clinical cancer (real-world conditions). But you can learn certain things about general drug biology through the study of cell-lines.
As a general rule, studies from established cell-lines (tumor cells that are cultured and maniplated so that they continue to divide) have proved worthless as models to predict the activity of drugs in cancer. They are more misleading than helpful. An established cell-line is not reflective of the behavior of the fresh tumor samples (live samples derived from tumors) in primary culture, much less in the patient.
Established cell-lines have been a huge disappointment over the decades, with respect to their ability to correctly model the disease-specific activity of new drugs. What works in cell-lines do not often translate into human beings. You get different results when you test passaged cells compared to primary, fresh tumor.
Research on cell-lines is cheap compared to clinical trials on humans. One gets more accurate information when using intact RNA isolated from “fresh” tissue than from using degraded RNA, which is present in paraffin-fixed tissue.
My question would be, do you want to utilize your tissue specimen for “drug selection” against “your” individual cancer cells or for mutation identification, to see if you are “potentially” susceptible to a certain mechanism of attack?
Cell Lines vs Fresh Cells
http://cancerfocus.org/forum/showthread.php?t=3702