A not so worthless attempt to develop primary culture from breast FNAC/CNB samples!

Breast cancer is the second leading death-causing cancer in women. Since a longtime, continuous breast cancer cell lines have been used for drug discovery based research. However, these cell lines may not represent the characteristics of original as they are believed to undergo changes due to repeated passaging. Primary cultures directly obtained from the tumor are gaining more attention worldwide as these are believed to mimic the disease process more accurately than that of continuous cell lines. The major problem with the usage of primary culture is to get the sufficient number of cells for the experiments. Here, in this study we attempted to develop primary culture both from FNAC and core needle biopsy (CNB) samples of the breast cancer patients. Overall, we believe that it is not so difficult to establish primary cultures of breast cancer cells from clinical FNAC/CNB samples. However, the starting population in FNAC samples is less which can be a hindrance in getting an adequate number of cells to reach a monolayer. CNB samples may be better quantitatively and stepwise troubleshooting of problems faced can help in the successful establishment of monolayer and primary cultures that can be propagated. We believe, our experience might be helpful for those who are struggling with the development of the short-term primary culture of breast cancer from the small-sized tissue samples.