If you are involved with managing the operation of a lab or biorepository, there are several productivity and profitability factors that you are constantly watching.  Like any operation, you are looking at capital costs, expenses and staffing, and you need to have good visibility on those costs to manage them.  For biobanking operations, there are several important cost factors that could be overlooked when managing a growing biological sample inventory.  Let’s look at some of the hidden costs that may not be fully evident on your balance sheet . . .

Hidden Capital Cost
Your sample inventory can be segmented and organized in a number of ways, including by project, sample age, client/user, staff responsibility, etc.  This commonly leads to the practice of... Read more

Bio-banking has seen many changes over the past decade and is an important resource in medical research. Because the biological samples (usually in vials) are processed, labeled, stored and retrieved, it is crucial for the samples to be handled properly to avoid a potentially dangerous outbreak.

A keen example in the past recent months, separate Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laboratories that store high-risk, “select agents”, inadvertently sent dangerous materials to other laboratories possibly infecting scientists and killing other test specimens. This included possibly exposing CDC employees to live anthrax. In an unrelated incident CDC director, Thomas Frieden also announced that two of six vials of smallpox recently found stored in a National Institute of Health... Read more