Arch Pathol Lab Med. 2013 Sep 25. [Epub ahead of print]

The Devil's in the Biorepository Details.

Allen TC.

Not long ago, ‘‘tissue integrity’’ merely meant determining that a patient’s tissue was not so degenerated that 

its use in rendering a histologic diagnosis was impossible or  its inclusion in a research study unsuitable. Ensuring ‘‘tissue integrity’’ was not much of a burden; experience with autopsy tissue shows pathologists early in their training that human tissue can exist in an unfixed state for a fairly long time before tissue degeneration is so severe as to make histologic diagnosis impossible. For surgical pathology specimens, then, where biopsies and surgical specimens are typically placed into formalin soon after being excised, tissue degeneration is generally not a problem.

Wiith the advent of molecular testing, things have changed.