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Do surgical tissue remnants have commercial value?

It is sometimes alleged that surgical remnants have significant commercial value and that is why commercial companies are willing to invest in the local infrastructure to collect, prepare, store, and distribute it.

Certainly there are examples of tissue samples from individual patients being the source of important discoveries or bio-medical resources (for example specific cancer causing gene alterations, cell lines, etc). Sometimes there is clearly a profit made from research carried out on individual patient's tissue, or from materials developed directly from the tissue (ex: Moore v. Regents of the University of California et. al.(1990) and Greenberg v. Miami Children's Hospital in 2003).

Individual tissue samples have little value for genomics and proteomics research. This is because this type of research generates findings from comparative study of large quantities of different tissue samples.

Some surgical tissue remnants potentially have commercial value, but medical centers routinely discard excess surgical remnants. The main reason for this is that presently commercial value is often not greater than the costs of preparation, storage, coding, etc. of research quality tissue which is labor intensive and therefore cost-prohibitive. Even when collaborations exist with commercial research repositories, most medical centers continue to discard surgical remnants that do not fit the collection protocol of the bank at a particular time. This is because the procedures for preparing research quality tissue samples and establishing informatics systems to retrieve clinical information are quite costly.