Table 1.

Merits and Demerits of Cancer Cell Lines (Modified from Ferreira 2013)

Merits	Demerits
Easy to handle and manipulate	Cross contamination of HeLa cells
High homogeneity	Loss of heterogeneity
High degree of similarity with initial tumour	Lack of genomic stability
Immediate accessibility	Possibility of modifying the characteristics of the cells
Unlimited auto-replicative source	Infections with Mycoplasma
Easy substitution	Difficulty in establishment of long term cancer cell lines
Reproducibility of results	Different environment of the tumour