Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine has selected iSpecimen, a customized human biospecimen collections company to serve as the exclusive channel partner for the Mayo Clinic Cancer/Normal Serum Biobank, connecting biomedical researchers with the samples and associated data for their studies.
Mayo Clinic Cancer/Normal Serum Biobank Overview
Based in Rochester, Minnesota, the Cancer/Normal Serum Biobank has approximately 130,000 frozen vials of serum from about 17,000 unique, consented patients. The samples were collected between 1975 and 1990 across 85 different malignant and benign conditions. As part of the channel partner agreement, iSpecimen, which works to procure annotated samples for life science researchers, will manage the serum inventory and associated data through its cloud-based technology solution, matching researchers to the right samples to fuel their studies.
Value Proposition for Precision Medicine
Mayo Clinic’s Cancer/Normal Serum Biobank presents research value not only due to the thousands of serum samples it holds, but also due to the longitudinal nature of many of the samples. Also of considerable value is the clinical annotation accompanying the samples, which includes patient demographics, blood collection data, tumor information, treatment information, and status of tumor at time of blood collection.
Recent Precision Medicine Funding with NIH
Mayo Clinic was recently awarded $142 million over five years by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to serve as the national Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) Cohort Program Biobank. Dr. Thibodeau and Mine Cicek, Ph.D. are the co-principal investigators of the funding award. This biobank will hold the research repository of biospecimens for the longitudinal program that aims to enroll one million or more U.S. participants to better understand individual differences that contribute to health and disease to advance precision medicine.
“As is the case with many biorepositories, intensive resources have been put into creating a variety of sample collections along with state-of-the-art facilities,” said Stephen Thibodeau, Ph.D., the David F. and Margaret T. Grohne Director, Biorepositories Program, Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine in a statement. “But despite holding thousands of sought-after samples, the biorepository is underutilized by external researchers. iSpecimen presented an opportunity for us to work with them to efficiently move these specimens into the hands of many more scientists studying cancer and related conditions, which ultimately should result in better treatments.”
