Newsletter – April 2019

Hope you are enjoying the weather in your part of the world. Unfortunately, it’s gotten very hot in Pune and will only get worse in the next few days! However, a lot of exciting things are happening in the OpenSpecimen world!

Here is a quick overview.

v6.0 released

Two very interesting features are introduced in this release: Google-like keyword search and Freezer Defragmentation report. For more details visit: https://www.openspecimen.org/openspecimen-v6-0-release/

OpenSpecimen v6.1 will be released in mid-May. Track v6.1 tickets here (needs Jira login).

New Adopters

  • MSKCC – Clinical Trial Center (New York, USA)
  • Allegheny Hospital Network (Philadelphia)
  • University of Miami – Cancer Center (Miami, USA)
  • Columbia University Medical Center (New York, USA)
  • NavarraBiomed (Navarra, Spain)
  • University of Basel (Basel, Switzerland)
  • Telethon Kids (Perth, Australia)

Case Studies

Johns Hopkins’s adoption of OpenSpecimen over the years
JHU has been using OpenSpecimen since 2008 (since the caTissue times) and has been a very active member of the OpenSpecimen community. This case study describes this collaboration over the years.

OpenSpecimen Helps SAHMRI (Adelaide) Manage Large Sample Inventory
SAHMRI is one of the recent adopters of OpenSpecimen in Australia. This case study outlines why they selected OpenSpecimen and how they went about adopting it.

Profiled feature: SpecimenCatalog

OpenSpecimen supports creating one or more catalogs to enable biobanks to share data with its researchers. It is very easy to create without any IT support and is highly configurable. I.e. which fields to expose on the catalog, filtering rare specimens, etc. For more details: https://www.openspecimen.org/specimencatalog-article/