There are various ways to donate tissue. As explained earlier, your pathologist uses tissue taken at the time of your biopsy and/or surgery to help make a diagnosis. There is often remaining tissue that you can donate to help researchers better understand cancer and/or to identify new biomarkers that may ultimately lead to new drugs.

Patients with small tumors may not be candidates for donating tissue. But in most cases, tissue remains after that used for diagnosis. For obvious reasons, many patients find it easier to donate blood, urine, saliva, and hair for research. However, the need is greatest for solid tumor tissue, particularly for rare cancers or rare subtypes of common cancers.

If you are unsure whether you have consented to donate your tissue, locate your consent for surgery and read the fine print. In the days, hours, and minutes leading up to surgery, some patients may be reluctant to read about the possible side effects of anesthesia or surgery and/or may later forget the details provided during the consenting process.

Patients enrolled in clinical trials increasingly are receiving requests for tissue in the informed consents for their studies or as a separate consent addendum. These studies may require tissue samples to help identify the genetic or protein targets of an investigational drug or to determine the characteristics of individuals who respond best or who do not respond at all to the research agent. Such studies are referred to as “correlative studies.”

Correlative studies tend to be exploratory in nature. Depending on the clinical trial design and other factors, they may require or request fresh tumor material, blood, or urine. In addition, some might request a tissue sample from the patient’s FFPE tumor block.

As noted above, different states vary in the length of time required for the archiving of tumor blocks. Once this time lapses, many hospitals, particularly community hospitals, discard the blocks to make room for new ones. Some research centers have created “discarded block programs” that permit them to obtain such blocks for research purposes, and many research hospitals never discard tumor blocks at all.

Extra Tissue Samples

Some studies will request additional biopsies. In such cases, researchers may request access to the initial tissue sample (obtained during biopsy or surgery) and a second or possibly additional tissue samples at later times based on specific criteria.