Considerations
Why use human tissue samples, blood samples or other biofluid samples?
Humans are genetically unique, with different life styles, diets, disease combinations, treatment combinations and develop diseases at different ages. This can make human biology complicated to study, but in the end, human tissue samples, before humans ourselves, are the only relevant testbed to advance human medicine.
Which format do you need?
What will you be using the tissue samples for? If you wish to study RNA or proteomics, for example, you may require frozen tissues, rather than FFPE blocks.
Can you use frozen tissues, serum, plasma or buffy coat, or do you need fresh materials? If you are growing cells, fresh cells are best, but otherwise, frozen specimens are more readily available and less challenging logistically as samples can be delivered with less time pressure during normal working hours, also reducing your courier costs.
Which data do you need?
Data may include a pathology report, clinical history, follow up data and/or a donor or next of kin medical history questionnaire.
Please be specific in listing everything you need to know, and everything you would like to know, but which is not essential.
Biorepositories, pathology sites and body donation centers vary in the types of data that are available, and charges may vary if additional clinical staff time is required to go through extensive full medical records.
Questions to consider: clinical specimens
Few living donors will be able to provide grams of material, particularly not from early stage cancers (more commonly detected in Western countries), or from small tumor sites.
Potential exceptions include CRC and ovarian tumors, amongst others. Ovarian tumors may be quite large, but the bulk of the tumor may actually have spread into the omentum. Are such invasive tissues good options for your research?
Normal tissue will usually be normal-adjacent to tumor, or another disease.
For obvious reasons, the need to spare as much normal tissue as possible during surgery to remove a brain tumor means that very little normal brain tissue is available from clinical donors. Colorectal cancer surgery, on the other hand, generally includes a fairly wide margin so that the surgeon can be confident that all of the tumor has been removed, so you are more likely to be able to obtain normal tissues from this type of surgery.
Melanoma primary tissue usually goes for diagnosis, but you may be able to obtain fresh metastatic melanoma tissue, or FFPE blocks that are more than 10 years old.If you require very large tissue samples, deceased donors may be more suitable for your work.
Another consideration is that if you are moving a diagnostic close to clinical application, it has to work on relatively small amounts of tissue or blood in order to be of practical use in the clinic.
Questions to consider: deceased donor specimens
Most donors are aged 60+, many have Type II diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure or other chronic conditions. Many smoke or consume alcohol. Most will have been on palliative care medications, which may include schedule II narcotics, anxiolytics and anti-depressants before they passed.
What is the highest PMI you can accept for deceased donor specimens?
If you wish to study RNA, you probably need shorter times than if you are studying proteins, for example. Certain organs degrade faster than other organs. What can you find out from the published literature?
It takes time between a donor passing & it being possible to collect tissue samples for your research. Researchers sometimes seem surprised that we can’t obtain specimens sooner than 3 hours, and that such donors are extremely rare. Please consider that the family’s needs need to be taken care of at the hospice or hospital, before paperwork can be completed and transport arranged. If complex preparation protocols (for example, “bread slicing” the brain at 1cm intervals on a teflon coated plate for your histology & RNA preparation) are required, this will also take time. So, if you can go up to 12h (or longer), tissue samples will be much more readily available. We will of course collect according to your exact specifications and preparation protocol, however stringent you require that collection to be- it will just be slower.
Questions to consider: fresh tissue samples or blood samples
Maximum acceptable time from sampling to delivery:
This question is more urgent for deceased donor tissue samples, as donors may pass at any time of the day or night, seven days a week, with little if any warning until the donor is en route.
This means that tissue samples are not always ready in good time for a FedEx pickup, or standard business day delivery!If you restrict delivery to FedEx, you may then have long delays from the sample being placed in media/buffer to being delivered at your lab.
If your tissue samples are very time sensitive, you may therefore wish to consider using a specialist next flight out courier which, whilst more expensive, will get you your tissue samples in good time.
Questions to consider: diseased tissue or blood samples
- Which stage(s) do you require? Is there any flexibility?
For example, late stage cancer donors (stage IV) may be less likely to be operated on and are more likely to have received treatment prior to surgery. Stage IV cancer patients may also be less well able to provide blood for research, so approval may not be given for a study, or for smaller volumes. Healthy donors may be able to give 40ml or even 500ml; a patient often only 10ml.
If you require large cancer samples, deceased donor specimens, where large tumor samples are available from donors where the cancer was the cause of death, may be a better option. The amount of tumor is extensive, metastases can also be collected if requested, and there is no need to spare normal tissue, or to retain tumor for diagnosis. - Pre-treated or treatment naïve?
Early stage cancer donors are more likely to present in Western countries, and surgeries are more likely to be performed treatment-naïve. Pre-treated patients’ cancer samples may have large areas of necrosis. - Do you need to place limits on this?
Deceased donors will often have received treatment, although usually not within approximately 2 months of passing. The large amounts of tumor available may compensate for lower cell viability or high necrosis levels. - Do you need a particular % tumor? Or limits re. the % necrosis?
Please let us know. Clinical tissue samples can be assessed by a pathologist to check they meet your requirements. - Do you have any limits re. treatments, or comorbidities?
- How much data do you need?
- Do you require biomarker data?
- Do certain biomarkers need to be present, or do you just need to know whether they have been assessed?
- What is your timeframe?
For examples, PSA readings may not have been taken on the day of surgery, or for some time before.
Questions to consider: control / normal / healthy samples
- Do donors need to be matched to a diseased sample set? If so, how closely? Age? (plus/minus 5 years?) Gender? Comorbidities? Treatments?
- Is Type II diabetes a problem?
- Other inflammatory diseases?
- A known history of cancer?
- Other, concurrent cancers or related diseases to that which you are studying?
- Smoking?
- Alcohol consumption?
- What about medications that many older donors may be on (if relevant), such as statins or blood pressure medications?
- How much data do you need?
- How long can you wait for your samples? (The more criteria you have, the longer it will take to find acceptable donors.)
Ready to make an inquiry? Please contact us on
info@biobankonline.com for rapid expert assistance on your human tissue research journey.
