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What kinds of data are needed?

At the very least, tissue researchers are interested in some limited demographic information, as well as histopathologic description of the tissue. Sometimes an accompanying image from a stained slide made from that tissue is helpful to researchers.

Additional data may include past medical information about that patient and his/her disease, such as family history, smoking history, related conditions, medicines taken, and/or some natural history of the disease for that individual (ex: a tumor sample representing a recurrence of disease at the primary site, or metastatic tissue from a known primary site following a particular adjuvant therapy).

Also, researchers may want treatment and outcome data from a period of time after the tissue is removed. This is particularly important for cancer research, where many studies rely on comparing the molecular signature in the primary tumor and/or the metastasis, with the type(s) of treatment received, the course of disease progression, and the types of toxicity.