Utilization of Discarded Surgical Tissue from Ultrasonic Aspirators to Establish Patient-Derived Metastatic Brain Tumor Cells: A Guide from the Operating Room to the Research Laboratory

Patient-derived cells from surgical resections are of paramount importance to brain tumor research. It is well known that there is cellular and microenvironmental heterogeneity within a single tumor mass. Thus, current established protocols for propagating tumor cells in vitro are limiting because resections obtained from conventional singular samples limit the diversity in cell populations and do not accurately model the heterogeneous tumor. Utilization of discarded tissue obtained from cavitron ultrasonic surgical aspirator (CUSA) of the whole tumor mass allows for establishing novel cell lines in vitro from the entirety of the tumor, thereby creating an accurate representation of the heterogeneous population of cells originally present in the tumor. Furthermore, while others have described protocols for establishing patient tumor lines once tissue has arrived in the research lab, a primer from the operating room (OR) to the research lab has not been described before. This is integral, as basic research scientists need to understand the surgical environment of the OR, including the methods utilized to obtain a patient's tumor resection, in order to more accurately model cancer biology in laboratory.