Clinical bladder cancer in sponge matrix tissue culture: procedures for collection, cultivation, and assessment of viability.

We studied the growth of surgically resected human bladder cancer in three dimensional tissue culture, Observations were made in the living cultures and after the sponge matrix cultures were fixed and prepared as histologic sections. We compared the histologic appearance of each tumor immediately after removal and after a week in culture. In a few instances the donor tumor was kept in medium at room temperature for one day before being inoculated into the matrix. This delay had only slight deleterious effect on the growth in culture. Over 85 consecutive cases have been placed in culture and the first 47 have been evaluated in histologic preparations. Tumors grew into the matrix with distinctly different patterns even when the zero time specimens were of similar histopathology. We also studied several antibiotics to idenify conditions that would suppress the usual urinary bacterial contaminants without producing cytotoxicity to tumor cells by microscopic evaluation. A combination of gentamicin and kanamycin, each at a concentration of 50 microgram/ml was effective.