ISBER Best Practices for Biobanking

ISBER, the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories, sets forth a comprehensive set of best practices to guide biobanks in maintaining the highest standards of sample management. ISBER best practices ensure the effective, ethical, and high-quality management of biological samples.

LabKey has recently become a member of ISBER and has aligned the features and capabilities of Sample Manager with these global standards. In this blog post, we provide a brief overview of ISBER best practices and share how LabKey Sample Manager supports these guidelines for biobanks and biobank management systems.

 

Overview of ISBER Best Practices

ISBER’s best practices cover a wide range of topics related to sample management and biobanking. The implementation of these practices is critical to the success of biobanks. They ensure that the biospecimens are of the highest quality and are reliable for research and therapeutic purposes. Moreover, adherence to these practices fosters trust among stakeholders, including donors, researchers, and regulatory bodies. These guidelines focus on:

Quality Management:

ISBER best practices advocate for comprehensive measures that span the entire sample lifecycle, emphasizing the use of standard operating procedures, regular audits, proficiency testing, and corrective actions.

Regulatory Compliance:

Compliance with ethical standards, donor consent, confidentiality, and legal aspects of sample collection and use is central to ISBER’s guidelines.

Sample Tracking:

Meticulous record-keeping, including sample provenance, chain-of-custody logs, and annotations, is a key aspect of ISBER’s best practices. These guidelines help ensure sample traceability and integrity in biobanks.

Storage and Preservation Protocols:

ISBER best practices provide detailed guidelines for optimal storage conditions for various sample types, highlighting the importance of temperature control, contamination prevention, and disaster recovery.

Data Management and Security:

Effective and secure data management systems are crucial, ensuring integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility of sample-related data.

 

LabKey Sample Manager: Supporting ISBER Practices

LabKey Sample Manager offers numerous features that support ISBER best practices:

Streamlined Sample Tracking:

The application supports detailed tracking of the entire sample lifecycle, ensuring traceability and accountability in line with ISBER best practices. Sample Manager easily tracks sample lineage, chain of custody and storage details.

Optimized Storage Management:

The freezer management features in Sample Manager allow you to create an exact virtual match of the physical storage options used in your lab, and track the location, usage and movement of your sample inventory. 

Compliance Support:

LabKey Sample Manager supports labs in maintaining compliance with regulations such as CFR Part 11, HIPAA and more. This includes capturing every action taken on a sample in an audit log and the availability of cloud hosting options that support regulations through enhanced data security. 

Robust Data Management:

Sample Manager unifies your samples with all of their related data in a central and secure cloud-hosted environment. Metadata can be added to describe samples which can then have any type of assay data to be associated with them. The application provides easy and efficient tools for uploading and managing sample-related data. 

Quality Management Support:

The software includes workflow management tools to guide biobank policies, processes, procedures, and responsibilities that support elements of a Quality Management System. These elements are unique to each biobank and the inherent flexibility of Sample Manager is critical in supporting the unique requirements of sample repositories. 

 

Learn More About Sample Manager

LabKey Sample Manager can significantly bolster adherence to ISBER best practices for biobanks and repositories. Visit our Sample Manager page to learn more.