34 Clinical OMICs July/August 2017 www.clinicalomics.com
In the Lab
A
ll around the world, human sam-
ples are stored in laboratories,
hospitals, and specialized facilities.
These collections vary significantly in
size—from single labs housing speci-
mens for individual projects, to large,
university-based biobanks. In the
United States alone, there are thou-
sands of such facilities. "Anybody
that's systemically collecting samples
is considered a biobank," said Andrew
Brooks, Ph.D., COO at RUCDR Infinite
Biologics, a Rutgers University-based
biorepository. "There are biobanks all
over the place, and [there is] a huge,
growing community."
Despite the growth in bioreposito-
ries, technical and operational hurdles
still stand in the way of investigators
procuring the right samples for their
research. In a 2011 National Cancer
Institute (NCI) survey of 727 cancer
researchers, 47 percent reported hav-
ing difficulty obtaining quality biospe-
cimens. And as the field of precision
medicine continues to accelerate, the
demand for high-quality samples will
likely continue to grow.
"Many investigators are constantly
looking for access to biosamples," said
Stephen Thibodeau, Ph.D., a co-di-
rector of the biorepositories program
at the Mayo Clinic. "Because it's just
really hard to get good samples that
are well annotated and meet the spe-
cific criteria that you want to have
large enough numbers."
Big repositories, such as those estab-
lished by RUCDR Infinite Biologics
and the Mayo Clinic, are trying to
respond to these demands by provid-
ing access to samples, as well as the
facilities to process, store and manage
them. Often, these facilities also pro-
vide access to researchers outside of
their respective institutions.
"Right now, there are lots of large
programs that exist academically and
commercially that are doing prospec-
tive collections, like us [at RUCDR],"
Dr. Brooks said. "People are generat-
ing biological assets for future use to
help decrease or to make the hurdle a
bit lower to get access to samples."
Improving Annotation
While many biorepostitories and com-
mercial specimen-researcher match-
makers are working to improve access
to biospecimens, uniform and consis-
tent clinical annotation remains a sig-
nificant hurdle for researchers looking
to gather multiple specimens from
multiple sources for their work.
"In order to get pathologists, radiol-
ogists, oncologists and surgeons to
produce data that can be used to anno-
tate tissue, there need to be standards
that are adopted across all fields and
across the entire nation," Mary E. Edg-
erton, a pathology professor at the MD
Anderson Cancer Center in Houston,
told Clinical OMICs. "While pathol-
ogy leads in this area, only 5 to 10%
of pathology laboratories are actually
collecting the data in a discretized
format."
Though samples collected at uni-
versity hospitals are usually anno-
tated, this is not always the case in
smaller community hospitals—and
even at the large centers, this process
is not yet completely standardized.
"Until we're all hooked up in elec-
tronic health records, that are com-
patible to each other and that people
can query, I think it will continue to be
challenging," said Kay Washington,
M.D., Ph.D., director of the Western
division of the Cooperative Human
Tissue Network (CHTN), an organiza-
tion established by the NCI to meet the
increasing demands for human tissue.
"I think we need better electronic tools
all around."
This is one of the focuses of the
CHTN. "We do simple things like
download the schedule for the oper-
ating rooms onto our system to flag
potential patient cases," Dr. Wash-
ington says. "Some of the sites are
developing tools to allow investiga-
tors outside their institutions to look
at what they have in the bank at the
moment and pick specimens that
might suit their needs."
Short Supply
Some areas of research face a bigger
supply shortage than others. Though
paraffin blocks are widely available,
they cannot be applied across all
Barriers in
Bio banking
Although the Demand for Human Samples
is Rising, Obstacles Remain in Connecting
Researchers with the Right Specimens
By Diana Kwon, Contributing Editor