Preparation of viable tumour cell vaccine from human solid tumours: relationship between tumour mass and cell yield. The Tissue Bank, Pittsburgh Cancer Institute.

Active specific immunotherapy for cancer often requires the use of autologous or allogeneic tumour cells as immunizing antigen. Tumours were obtained for such a protocol. However, estimation of viable cell yield from pre-processed fresh tumour mass was difficult, and initially there did not appear to be a direct relationship between pre-processed tumour mass and viable cells obtained after processing. We therefore analysed all of 293 tumour specimens processed to attempt to discern such a relationship. Of these 137 were melanoma, 14 were sarcoma, 48 were adenocarcinoma, 59 were renal cell carcinoma and 35 were classified as other. A positive correlation was found between pre-processed tumour mass and viable cell yield, with Spearman correlation values varying from r = 0.49 (adenocarcinoma) to r = 0.84 (melanoma). For all tumours the Spearman correlation was r = 0.70 (p = 0.0001). Not surprisingly, the most frequent site of removal associated with bacterial contamination was bowel. In conclusion, this study provides useful curves for predicting viable tumour cell yield from pre-processed tumour mass of given histology.