BIOBANKING
Biobanking – supporting research with pathology techniques
Alan Kennedy, Specialist Biomedical Scientist Clinical Research, shines a light on the role played by the NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde Biorepository in medical research and its real-world applications in advancing patient care.
With the rapid development of personalised medicine, patients may be offered different types of treatment such as gene editing and therapy. And for the clinicians, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming very helpful with diagnosis. With these advances in medicine comes a need for more tissue-based research. Research on blood and tumour samples from individual donors is needed for more informative biomarker studies. To provide enough samples for research, human tissue is collected, stored and processed through biobanks and biorepositories across the UK. Fixed tissue from diagnostic archives can also be made available. In Scotland there are four NHS Research Scotland accredited
Archived
diagnostic/biobanked tissue pathway
Submit
application via NHS GBR
Review and approve
biorepositories. These biorepositories are directly responsible to their corresponding health boards and work closely with their medical schools.
Contribution to research Biobanking is the structured process of collecting, processing, and preserving high-quality biological samples for use in biomedical research. These samples are stored in biorepositories, where they are governed by rigorous ethical and quality Standards (Fig 1). Biorepositories work closely with pathology departments, academic institutions, and industry partners, facilitating research that leads to new diagnostics, therapies, and clinical innovations. Pathology services
Archived cases identified and anonymised via NHS GBR staff
Slides/blocks retrieved
play a central role in this ecosystem, helping provide samples and ensuring that the most appropriate specimens are diagnostically validated, representative, and suitably handled. The combination of histopathology, immunohistochemistry, and digital imaging techniques along with other processing methods adds significant value to the samples, making the samples more usable and research ready. The linkage of clinical data with the samples also provides valuable information for research purposes. In NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde (GG&C) a biorepository was established in 2002 to provide human tissue for research under a robust ethical framework and governance structure.1
Twenty-three
Tissue preparation work if required
Release to researcher
Surplus prospective tissue collection pathway
Fig 1. Biorepository pathway. 24 AUGUST 2025
WWW.PATHOLOGYINPRACTICE.COM
Tissue collected from theatres
Processed to FFPE/frozen
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