YSM Biobank Goals & Objectives

The overarching objectives of the YSM Biobank are to support biomedical research including clinical trials, standardize how the university curates and releases data, support focused research, and serve community health initiatives.

Utilizing archived and fresh specimens as a first step, the goal of the YSM Biobank is to streamline the distribution of specimens to investigators and promote collaboration of partners across the university. The YSM Biobank will expand the collection of live cells, tissue, DNA, RNA, and proteins.

The collection of these samples is predominantly from pathology and clinical labs, archived tissues, fresh tissues, blood, or body fluid that is to be discarded after the completion of routine diagnosis.

The collection of these specimens will be monitored based on the distribution and investigators’ need without wasting resources.

The YSM Biobank will support biospecimen needs of investigator-initiated research projects and program projects such as U-grants, P-grants, SPOREs, or biotech-sponsored projects. It will help develop SOPs and protocols to meet the specific requirements of each project.

The YSM Biobank will partner with investigators for their grant application by providing all documents pertinent to specimen collection, processing, analysis, storage, and distribution. The distribution or sharing of these specimens will be determined by the Principal Investigators.

The YSM Biobank will provide staffing and technical support for biospecimen collection, processing, storage, and distribution according to the specific clinical trial protocols.

With its CAP-accreditation, the YSM Biobank can serve as a central specimen storage and distribution site for multi-center clinical trials.

At Yale there are numerous existing tissue banks with many specimens and long-standing operations. These are managed by individual investigators, multi-disciplinary research teams, or a cooperative research entity such as a SPORE grant or Yale Cancer Center Disease Aligned Research Teams. With the establishment of the centralized YSM Biobank, these banks will continue in their present form under the same governance structures without disruption of existing support.

In cases of limited tissue availability, existing banks with discrete consenting processes will take precedence for tissue collection over the centralized YSM Biobank. In addition, we will offer existing tissue banks the opportunity to access the centralized YSM Biobank effort, thereby allowing the current successful banks to utilize the infrastructure, resources, and facilities of the YSM Biobank.

Yale Pathology Tissue Services (YPTS) currently has established tissue procurement capacity and methods. This capacity will be leveraged and potentially amplified as needed to provide some or all of the physical procurement of tissues. YPTS also has tissue analysis divisions and a division for clinical trial tissue support. These facilities will remain in Pathology and function in parallel with the new repository, continuing to offer tissue prep and analysis to investigators as needed once they withdraw tissues from the repository.