Co-Chair: Fay Betsou
Co-Chair: Kathi Shea

Biospecimens stored in biorepositories are intended to be used for biomarker identification and validation. The performance of such biomarkers greatly depends on the pre-analytical variations of the samples that were used for their initial identification. Quality assurance on this issue is therefore of the utmost importance and allows us to establish the right correspondence between processing methods and end-use biomarkers. 

Goals

1. Selection of biospecimen quality assurance schemes.
2. Identification of biospecimen handling critical points.
3. Standardization of biospecimen research protocols.
4. Identification of Quality Control (QC) tools.
5. Reviews on biospecimen science topics.
6. Validation of biospecimen processing methods.
7. Validation of biospecimen QC methods.

Projects

• ISBER Biospecimen Science Working Group Literature Compilation
• Additional Literature Database Resource:
  • The U.S. National Cancer Institute sponsors a Biospecimen Science literature database, the Biospecimen Research Database (BRD). The BRD houses expert scientific curations of more than 2000 published articles related to Biospecimen Science and is freely available to the public at:  https://brd.nci.nih.gov/.
• From Biospecimen Logistics to Biospecimen Science
• Biospecimen Science Working Group Published Papers
• SPRECalc Tool - SPREC v2:
  • SPRECalc SOLID_V1.0 for solid samples
  • SPRECalc FLUID_V1.0 for fluid samples
  • SPRECalc Release Notes V1.0

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