Operations

Biomaterials and data will be collected from two streams of men, those undergoing radical prostatectomies and those at-risk of developing cancer undergoing screening biopsies. The Biobank will be a repository only, and will perform only the basic (up-front) processing of materials to ensure long-term storage for distribution to researchers. A pay-per-sample model will be adopted for tissue distribution in order to ensure long-term sustainability of the Biobank. The Biobank will establish itself as the guardian of prostate cancer related biomaterials and accompanying data, for distribution to researchers based on an intelligent and fair system of allocation.




The Biobank will be a distributed organisation with the vast majority of resources deployed at the various university and affiliated hospitals and research institutes. Biobank nurses and technicians will work within each of the centres where dedicated Biobank facilities and equipment will be located. Biobank staff will work closely with key non-Biobank personnel at the hospitals/clinics including clinicians who will recruit patients and provide the biomaterials through procedures, pathologists who will perform the tissue sampling and critical validation of materials, ethicists in Institutional review Boards (IRB) who will overview Biobank practices , will ensure privacy, confidentiality and good research practices, and basic researchers. Biobank nurses will perform the consenting procedures, interviews, collection of biomaterials other than prostate tissue and follow-up interviews for prospective data collection. The university and affiliated hospital research institutes will house the Biobank Labs and storage facilities. The multi-site Biobank IT infrastructure will be distributed across the hospitals and research institutes where collection, processing and storage will take place. A wide area network will be established across all these sites via the Biobank head office, enabling data sharing and central processing.