The Importance of Large Scale Biobanking in Region Skane

With the automated liquid handling and pipetting platforms from Hamilton Robotics, FoU Centre at Skåne university hospital in Lund has develop and implemented a high density
384-format sample tube system for the preservation and archiving of clinical
blood samples. This system will be used within the major hospitals in Region
Skåne for Centralized BioBanking (Reference 1-2).

FoU Centre
Skåne have developed a fully automated Blood fractionation Processing Work Flow- aliquoting 70-µL volumes fractions of; EDTA, Li-heparin, and citrate plasma, as well as serum, buffy coat and erythrocyte fractions. Samples from patients are processed and aliquoted in 384-sample racks automatically. The FoU Centre Skåne development team has demonstrated that the validated system is working well and superior to manual handling, thus making it suitable handling samples for Biobanking. The “BIG3” Study,Cardiovascular Diaseas, Lung Cancer and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD); will be the first user of the infrastructure. Big3 is a prospective cohort study that will do high density data sampling and biobanking from 10 000 participants. Within this study, blood samples were analyzed quantifying 23 common markers used in everyday healthcare around the world.

By utilizing this new biobanking work-flow, we have so far processed more than 100.000 sample types with the 384 high density formats, and this will be the future standard in modern clinical chemistry biobanking. The standardization of sample preparation and storage will provide measures of quality needed to ensure that the sample sets in the future will be an analysis resource globally for the community, the science and for the development of new medicines and diagnostics,  in addition to novel methodologies and the development of innovative technology platforms.

1. Malm
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        Proteomics.,  76, 116-124, 2012 “Large Scale Biobanking of Blood – The
        importance of high density sample processing procedures”


2. Marko-Varga
        G, Végvári A, Welinder C, Rezei M., Edula G., Svensson K., Belting M.,
        Laurell T., Fehniger T. E., J. Proteome Res., 2012, 11, 5124-34, “Clinical
        Protein Science: Utilization of Biobank Resources and Examples of Current
        Applications”