At Mayo Clinic, the Center for Individualized Medicine oversees the Biorepositories Program, which is a collection of biospecimens, such as tissue, blood, plasma, serum, urine, DNA, RNA and live cells, from patients and research volunteers. These biospecimens are used throughout the clinic for researches to utilize for a broad range of tests and research.

The infrastructure programs of the Biorepositories Program is to not only support the BioBank at Mayo Clinic but research within the clinic as a whole. They handle the logistics of sampling, plating, and getting what the researchers need for their programs.

"Biorepositories help us in a couple ways. One way is sort of the old way of doing studies was somebody had an idea, they went out and recruited the patients, collected the samples, answered the question. The nice thing about biorepositories is by putting it together upfront people can come, ask their question, have the samples pulled, assays run; you can get an answer maybe in three or four months. So it's speeding up the process of research." James R. Cerhan, M.D., Ph.D.

The Mayo Clinic BioBank itself set out in 2009 with a goal of collecting 50,000 total samples, with around 15,000 to go to reach that benchmark. The focus has been on collecting material from participants who are generally healthy.

Learn more about our Biorepositories Program here.

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