'lizbeth
Like your thoughts about these assays being available when you were first diagnosed, they were available when my wife had her 24 year recurrence in 1996. Her thoracic surgical oncologist didn't know about them. She sure does now! I educated her on them. If she ever developed cancer, she would want to have her tumor cells assayed. And this is where I learned about Dr. William R. Grace in NYC. He had been using the assays for his clients since the early '90s. My wife and I would have traveled from southeastern Pennsylvania to NYC to be treated by him.
Presented in 2011, in the first head-to-head clinical trial comparing gene expression patterns (molecular profiling) with personalized cancer cytometric testing (functional profiling or chemosensitivity testing), personalized cancer cytometrics was found to be substantially more accurate. It was hoped that something like this clinical study would be proposed at one of the semi-annual GOG meetings. Perhaps a good three-armed clinical trial: physician's choice vs molecular profiling vs functional profiling? It would shed a lot of important light on the relative value of cell culture vs targets, let alone "trial-and-error" physician's choice.
http://www.cancerfocus.org/forum/showthread.php?t=3614