Culture of Clinical Specimens in Agar

Lung cancer is a major health problem in the Western world. It is the leading cause of death from malignant disease in men over the age of 35 and the second leading cause of cancer mortality in women as a whole.' The incidence of the disease continues to increase in the female population at an alarming rate. Modern medicine has made little impact on the natural history of the condition, surgery still offering the best chance of cure to a small minority of patients with resectable tumours. Intensive combination chemotherapy has improved life expectancy in some patients with small cell lung cancer, but long term survival in this group is rare. Although few important advances in the clinical management of the condition have been seen in the past decade, there has been an explosion of information on the basic cellular and molecular biology of the disease. This research has been facilitated by technological developments that have made it possible to grow human lung cancers for prolonged periods in the laboratory. In vitro and in vivo models have allowed both the study of the biological characteristics of the disease and assessment of the chemosensitivity of individual tumours to be performed in the laboratory. Most of this progress has originated from cancer research establishments engaged in basic laboratory research. Few reports of this work have appeared in respiratory medicine publications, and it is disappointing that more of the respiratory physicians and thoracic surgeons who spend much of their time treating patients with lung cancer are not working in this exciting area of research. This article, the first of three on the study of lung cancer in the laboratory, reviews the methods by which cancer cells can be grown in the laboratory to provide models of human lung cancer.