Industry News: Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust Update Their Biological Sample Storage Systems

The Biorepository at the Guy’s and St Thomas’ Bioresource stores a variety of samples, including whole blood, plasma and sera. With some 30,000 samples from 5,200 volunteers and patients now collected, a Matrix Gemini Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) from Autoscribe Informatics has been implemented to manage all aspects of sample handling and allow the most efficient use of freezer storage space. System actions include sample tracking, location recording and chain of custody reporting with full audit trails of all activities.

Autoscribe Informatics has published a new case study highlighting the use of Matrix Gemini for this application. The Guy’s and St Thomas’ BioResource facility provides expertise on all aspects of the collection of human samples. It is part of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) BioResource which operates across eight centres in the UK and aims to establish cohorts of healthy volunteers and patients who have provided clinical information and biological samples and who can be invited to participate in experimental medicine studies.

“We have extensive experience of implementing biobanking solutions,” commented John Boother, President of Autoscribe Informatics. “This means that we were able to demonstrate real-world biobank workflows to Guy’s and St Thomas’ staff and were able to work closely with them to use the Matrix configuration tools to build the workflows and screens that they specifically needed.”

This flexibility of configuration has proved to be particularly important to Guy’s and St Thomas’. They have taken out a maintenance contract and staff have attended both configuration and report generation training courses so that they can make their own adjustments to the system in the future, if and when their needs change.

“The beauty of this approach,” concluded Boother, “is not only that the system is future-proofed against changing requirements, but also any changes that they themselves make to the screens will be fully supported by Autoscribe while the maintenance agreement is in place.”