Overview

The Partners Personalized Medicine Biorepository (PPMB) program is designed to support enterprise-wide specimen banking operations and systems at Partners HealthCare System. Its objective is to drive the next generation of biomedical discoveries by providing investigators with easily accessible, inexpensive patient samples. The Partners, BWH and MGH Research Organizations are working with Research Computing, BWH Pathology, and MGH Pathology to define and implement the required systems, operations, and infrastructure. 

The Partners Personalized Medicine Biorepository will enable the collection, storage, and distribution of specimens, including tissue and blood. Some of the Research Computing tools that the initiative will provide are:

• Tools to query for specimens - The RPDR will be enhanced with specimen query functionality

• Tools to track the consent status of patients - a new consent tracking application is in development

• Tools to manage the inventory of specimens - a new inventory management application is planned

The initiative is phased over several years. In its first phase, the Partners Personalized Medicine Biorepository is addressing the collection and storage of blood and blood derivatives. Tissue will be addressed in later stages. In 2009, the program is supporting a pilot to collect and store consented blood derivatives. As such, the systems and tools provided in 2009 will be limited and available only to clinical programs and investigators that are participating in the pilot. The program will be expanded beyond these initial pilots starting in 2010.  

Systems and Infrastructure for Specimen Banking

The Partners Personalized Medicine Biorepository is building on existing systems to further the goal of an enterprise-wide specimen bank operation. A number of new systems will be developed and a number of existing systems and operations will be integrated. In summary, some of the tools involved in the specimen banking program are:

• Enterprise Master Specimen Index - The Enterprise Master Specimen Index (EMSI) enables the identification and tracking of specimens as unique entities across the enterprise, regardless of their point of origin or storage. The EMSI is a critical component in the BETR infrastructure at Partners HealthCare because specimens originate from and are stored in a variety of physical locations and in a variety of systems.

• Consent Tracking System - This new system will enable the tracking of patient consent status.

• Specimen Portal - This new enhancement to the RPDR will enable investigators to query for specimens based on a combination of specimen and patient criteria.
   
• Inventory Management - The inventory management system will manage inventory at the specimen banks and will integrate with laboratory management systems at the MGH and the BWH.
   
• Crimson - This tool currently in production enables the collection of discarded blood specimens (see below).
  

For more information about the informatics that enable specimen banking at Partners, please contact Natalie Boutin (nboutin@partners.org) within the Research Computing team. 

While the Partners Personalized Medicine Biorepository is still in the process of being built out, an application called Crimson already supports the prospective collection and distribution of blood specimens. The Crimson application was developed to facilitate support of research investigations at Partners-affiliated institutions. Crimson taps into discarded sample streams to allow prospective collection of materials for designated research use or to develop retrospective repositories around specific diseases or organ systems.

For more information about Crimson, please contact Lynn Bry or Neil Herring. Information is also available at:crimson.bwh.harvard.edu/