Biorepositories

Despite the in silicoresearch ideals of many genomicists, no one has yet found a way around the basic requirement for using human tissue in gene expression studies—a broad array of it, well characterized, from healthy and diseased patients, and from world populations at large, and not just from isolated populations on tiny volcanic islands (like Tristan da Cunha, where the former Sequana Therapeutics, now Applera Corp. 's Axys Pharmaceuticals Inc., conducted its hunt for asthma genes). But there is no comprehensive source of human tissue: it comes from hospital surgery and pathology departments, doctors' offices, blood banks and government repositories, like the many banks created by the disease-specific research programs of the National Institutes of Health . Therefore, procuring tissue is a complicated and labor-intensive task for researchers, requiring phone calls and faxes to clinics and hospitals, and negotiating pricing that isn't market-based—a researcher can pay $700 to $3500 for the same sample. There are unique operational issues for those medical institutions that wish to provide tissue, for example, how to ship and store tissue with associated medical records and other clinical data, and how to obtain valid and workable informed consent agreements from tissue donors.

While tissue is a raw material for drug discovery, it isn't a commodity like other life science reagents. No two...