Expression Profiling of Tissues versus Primary Cultures from Colorectal Cancer Patients

The main aim of this study is to evaluate how comparable the established colorectal primary tumor cultures are to the original tumor tissues obtained directly from patients in terms of their genomic profile for which they can be eventually utilized to improve in vitro drug assessment and facilitate personalized treatment. Here, we used colorectal cancer patient samples collected after surgery to perform a gene expression comparison study between original tissues and self-established primary cultures. Subsequently, we also investigated the possibility of using primary cells from patients’ tumors as a model for assessing drug response by characterizing the modifications in gene-drug associations of the primary cells which occurred during the establishment of cell cultures. On an auxiliary note, cytogenetic studies are only possible in cultured cells and not in tissue samples, hence, in this study we also evaluated the potential of genome stability analysis on primary cells as an alternative method to improve our understanding of the genomic changes which occur in cancer initiation and progression. Using cRNA microarrays, gene expression of low-passage colorectal tumor primary cultures were compared against colorectal tumor tissues obtained directly from patients.