Dave Mulvihill, Director Informatics, Washington University (WU) Tissue Procurement Core, presented how they use OpenSpecimen’s “Project Tracker” module to streamline biobank “Projects & Requests” – eliminating cumbersome Excels and relying on emails. Washington University is one of the oldest and largest adopters of OpenSpecimen. At WU, OpenSpecimen is used by 100+ users across ~50 research […]
Currently, biobanks at the University Hospital Basel are not centralized. Storage locations are distributed over organizational units, which partly are about to be centrally managed. Biobank inventory management is currently performed in disconnected systems, including Excel lists. There is currently no integrated biobank management software solution in place. To achieve a professional biobank software solution […]
This case study describes the adoption of OpenSpecimen at one of the biggest biobanks in gastroenterology (GI) cancer in an academic center in Pittsburgh. Prior to OpenSpecimen, they used an in-house system to store clinical and specimen data. However, it had several shortcomings which were severely impeding their ability to find specimens of research interest. […]
Following is a poster presented by the Victorian Cancer Biobank team on using OpenSpecimen for ‘Improving interoperability and quality of data’ at the ABNA 2019 conference. VCB has collected more than 600,000 biospecimens from a broad range of tumours, and approximately 423,000 biospecimens are currently in our inventory. OpenSpecimen was implemented as the biobank information […]
Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM) is one of the top institutions in the USA. They are committed to human healthcare research. WUSM has been using OpenSpecimen for 10+ years as the “Enterprise” biospecimen management platform. Within WUSM, OpenSpecimen is used by ~100 users across ~50 sites, including the Tissue Procurement Core (TPC), Alliance Trial, and […]
The enthusiasm surrounding biobanking and clinical research has gone through an upsurge in the past decade. Governments and industries have been heavily investing in these studies and, undoubtedly, the medical and scientific benefits have been enormous. But even with such scale of infrastructure, the industry lacks a consensus on the subject of ‘Informed consent’ (1,2). […]
As funding bodies push for translational research, more researchers need access to biospecimens and de-identified clinical data. However, it can be difficult for researchers to find which biobanks store the specimens they need since data is not easily accessible. On the other hand, biobanks have a bigger problem – improving their specimen utilization rate. More than two-thirds […]
OpenSpecimen can be integrated with REDCap (or other EDCs like OpenClinica) to eliminate manual data entry and query data across the two systems. The plugin is currently used by many customers including Washington University, Columbia University, Telethon Kids (Perth), and University of British Columbia (Vancouver). The plugin performs the one-way data synchronization from REDCap to […]
For large enterprise biobanks, e.g. with 20+ concurrent users, it is imperative to setup your biobank data server across multiple app servers (Tomcats/JBoss) behind a load balancer. Load balancer helps in achieving high throughput, minimizing response times and better utilisation of resources. A by-product of setting up load balancer is to increase reliability and availability […]
