STRIDE Virtual Biospecimen Bank

Many academic health centers involved in biomedical research operate multiple tissue and biospecimen banks. Each bank may use its own proprietary database for registering, characterizing and tracking biospecimens. This common scenario makes it difficult for researchers to obtain an enterprise view of which institutional biospecimens might be available for research use. Multiple biospecimen databases also makes it difficult, and expensive, to link biospecimen data to associated clinical data. The STRIDE Virtual Biospecimen Bank is addressing this problem at Stanford by building a standards-based representation of biospecimen samples into the STRIDE Biomedical Research Data Repository. Though multiple physical biospecimen banks will continue to exist across the enterprise, we are moving towards integration of the information about these specimens within a single database, using a common set of data descriptors. We are prototyping this model with a number of Cancer Biospecimen Banks, including:

• The Cancer Center Solid Tumor Tissue Bank - managed by Jonathan Pollack MD (Pathology). This repository contains several thousand freshly frozen tumor and normal tissues from excess surgical material and from autopsy as part of the Stanford Cancer Center's Tissue Procurement Facility Share Resource.
• The Bone Marrow Transplant Bank - Bone marrow transplant (BMT) bank - sponsored by David Miklos MD, PhD and managed by Kevin Sheehan PhD (Dept. of Medicine-BMT). This repository comprises over 5,000 serum and plasma samples from patients with multiple myeloma, acute leukemia, chronic myeloid leukemia, myelodysplastic syndrome and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Specimens have been used primarily to study immune reconstitution following BMT.
• Brain Tissue Bank - managed by Griff Harsh MD (Neurosurgery) and Hannes Vogel MD (Neuropathology). This repository includes several hundred neurosurgical cases, including both benign and malignant CNS tumors.
• Hematology Division Tissue Bank - managed by Jason Gotlib MD (Dept of Medicine-Hematology). This repository comprises over 3,800 specimens including leukemias, myelodysplasias and myeloproliferative disorders. Mononuclear cells from peripheral blood or bone marrow specimens are purified by Ficoll gradient centrifugation and stored as viable cell pellets.

In each case we have designed a sophisticated biospecimen registration and tracking system, within STRIDE, to meet the needs of each biospecimen bank, while ensuring that core data about each specimen is represented using national biomedical data standards. It will therefore be possible to support integrated searching of all the constituent biospecimen databases that are part of this Virtual Biospecimen Database. A prototype of this Anonymous Biospecimen Locator Tool has been developed and is currently being tested.