Biospecimen Services provides researchers with high quality biospecimens and related clinical data in order to facilitate discoveries that will lead to improvements in disease diagnosis and treatment. We commenced operation in 2010 and are now centrally funded by UNSW under the Division of Research.
As part of our services we now provide assistance with biospecimen related ethics applications, access to samples/data already curated within the Health Precincts Biobank, planning of investigator led sample collections, access to a biobanking database and assistance with processing/storage/shipping of biospecimens.
In the past 18 months however we have found a new trend of requests from other collections and biobanks for their samples to be not only housed with UNSW but their governance and management to sit with the university. We describe here some of the difficulties we have faced in attempting to take this on and ensure the wishes of the patients who have donated their samples are honoured. We will share our learnings across 4 different collections which are at various stages in this process, and how it has informed some of the changes we would like to make to ensure that our collections moving forward can be curated beyond the life of UNSW Biospecimen Services, if required.