Home Research on Human Tissue

What are the sources of human tissue?

The best sources of healthy and diseased human tissue are medical centers where patients who undergo surgery might be asked to donate any excised tissue that remains after enough has been processed for diagnostic purposes.

For example, when a patient has a tumor removed, there often is excess tumor tissue left beyond the piece(s) used by the pathologist to make the diagnosis and to provide prognostic information. Most medical centers routinely discard this potential research material because it is of no further use to help the patient, and because medical centers lack the funds to maintain a full-scale bank of research-quality tissue. With the exception of a few cooperative national research tissue banks established by the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Health, and other government health organizations, there are few large non-profit research tissue banks in the United States, and those are primarily special collections (e.g., Harvard brain bank).

Another source of human tissue is from post-mortem donations, however because quality control is more difficult, it is less likely to be a common source of tissue for research.