Chemosensitivity testing of revived fresh-frozen biopsies using digital speckle holography

Enrolling patients in clinical trials to obtain fresh tumor biopsies to profile anticancer agents can be slow and expensive. However, if flash-frozen biopsies can be thawed to produce viable living tissue with relevant biodynamic profiles, then a large reservoir of tissue-banked samples could become available for phenotypic library building. Here, we report biodynamic profiles acquired from revived flash-frozen canine B-cell lymphoma biopsies using digital speckle holography. We compared the thawed-tissue drug-response spectrograms to spectrograms from fresh tissues in a study of canine B-cell lymphoma. By compensating for tissue trauma in the thawed sample, patient clustering of both the fresh and thawed samples were found to be in general agreement with clinical outcomes. This study indicates that properly frozen tumor specimens are a viable proxy for fresh specimens in the context of chemosensitivity testing, and that thawed samples from tissue banks contain sufficient viable cells to evaluate phenotypic drug response.