Purpose of review: Precision medicine promises patient tailored, individualized diagnosis and treatment of diseases and relies on clinical specimen integrity and accuracy of companion diagnostic testing. Therefore, pre-analytics, which are defined as the collection, processing, and storage of clinical specimens, are critically important to enable optimal diagnostics, molecular profiling, and clinical decision-making around harvested specimens. This review article discusses the impact of tumor pre-analytics on molecular pathology focusing on biospecimen protein expression and analysis.
Recent findings: Due to busy clinical schedules and workflows that have been established for many years and to lack of standardization and limited assessment tools to quantify variability in pre-analytical processing, the effects of pre-analytics on biospecimen integrity are often overlooked. Several studies have recently emphasized an emerging crisis in science and reproducibility of results.
Summary: Biomarker instability due to pre-analytical variables affects comprehensive analysis and molecular phenotyping of patients' tissue. This problematic emphasizes the critical need for standardized protocols and technologies to be applied in the clinical and research setting.
Keywords: Biospecimen processing and storage; Protein biomarkers as companion diagnostics; Tissue integrity; Tumor pre-analytics in precision medicine.