Innovation happens here – with facilities and experts.
The University at Buffalo (UB) biorepository program is designed to advance discovery and innovation in healthcare by providing a unique, centralized resource of high-quality, deeply annotated biospecimens to support present and future research studies, diagnostic development, and the creation of new therapeutics.
Biorepository services are available to State University of New York institutions, private colleges and universities, research centers and industry partners.
The biorepository program has implemented cutting edge technology and has created a quality program to ensure that all biobank services and facilities ensure:
The biorepository program supports four main operations to ensure complete digital and physical chain of custody: collection, processing, storage and distribution.
Biospecimen sample collection kits are manufactured to ensure reproducible and reliable collection. Through advanced barcode processing and scanning each sample is tracked at the time of collection and data transferred into the biorepository’s laboratory information management system (e.g. origin of the sample, time the sample arrived, etc.)
Automated pre-processing (i.e. blood fractionation, pathology services) and processing (i.e. nucleic acid extraction, PBMC processing) help minimize variation of primary biosamples and their analytes for banking.
Regulated sample storage environments are available and applied to all biosamples based on the sample type specific temperature and environmental requirements. All storage environments are highly regulated, monitored 24/7/365, supported by complete and continuous back up power, and are supported by redundant freezers for uninterrupted storage. This critical piece of the service workflow ensures sample quality until the time any sample is requested for use.
The success of any biorepository is the use of the samples it houses. In addition, the ability to retrieve samples in a safe and timely manner is a critical component to the biobank service set. Due to high quality sample storage information in the biobank LIMS and the utilization of automation friendly storage vessels the UB Biobank can support high volume sample requests on a moment’s notice.
Environmental monitoring system tracks all cold storage, room temperature, lab humidity 24/7/365.
Phone and email trees are in place for when variances occur
-80° storage all on back up power with supplemental HVAC to ensure proper environment for freezer compressors.
Provides accurate and robust cryopreservation of all samples being processed for mechanistic or functional analyses.
Automated cryo storage with inventory management. Maintains temperature of racks in tower while pulling samples.
Maintain -155° for collections directly from OR. Also used to transport specimens and maintain cold chain. Temperatures are monitored and tracked.
Integration of imaging and liquid level sensing technologies to reproducibly separate sample fractions with complete accuracy and no risk of contamination. Barcode reader for both source/input tubes and destination tubes to track parent/child tube relationships.
Automated liquid handling. Can start with any size or shape container. Barcode reader for both source/input tubes and destination tubes to track parent/child aliquot schemes.
Analytical Quality Control of DNA, RNA, and Plasma. Cuvetteless spectroscopy which gives results comparable to picogreen (due to contaminant profiling) in a fraction of the time. Also contains contamination profiles to show any type of impurities within the samples.
Functional quality control for nucleic acid which determines fragment length using automated gel electrophoresis.
With the Biomark⢠HD system. Molecular fingerprinting of DNA. All DNA samples that come through the lab are ran on this equipment and compared to all other DNA samples to both check sample quality and check for cross contamination. Functional quality is also confirmed using the SNPTrace panel, which interrogates regions known to affect sample quality in downstream analyses.
Non-contact volume measurement that eliminates the potential for sample contamination and is accurate down to several ul. Checks volume of an entire plate at 1 time.
Nucleic acid extraction of specimens. Types of input material blood, tissue, and saliva. Can do as small a reaction as 10ul or as large as 10mL. Utilizes bead based extraction chemistry.