  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.
