- Home
- Networks & Workstreams
- Cancer – Teenage and Young Adult
- Tissue Banking
Tissue Banking for professionals
What is tissue banking and why is it important
All patients must be offered the opportunity to have their tissue banked for research (NHS England service specifications for all primary treatment centres and designated hospitals with TYA services). The intention of biobanking is to provide a repository of samples for researchers to access in order to improve understanding of the causes, development and treatment response of cancer cells and associated biomarkers.
Samples that can be banked:
- FFPE blocks
- FFPE slides
- Fresh Frozen tissue
- Bone marrow aspirate
- CSF
- Peripheral blood
- Plasma
- Skin biopsies
- Saliva
When and how?
Patients can be consented to tissue banking at any time and tissue for banking can be leftover samples following diagnostic confirmation, or patients can have extra samples collected during procedures with the purpose of banking them. Best practice is to consent patients upfront, however you can seek consent retrospectively if time does not allow for consent samples are collected.
Ways to offer tissue banking for your patient:
Supporting local banks
Many hospitals in the region will have a biobank with projects focusing on collecting cancer samples. Where this is the most meaningful place to send samples, clinical teams should be consenting patients using the local biobank patient information and consent forms.
Contributing to the national TYA biobank
If your site does not have a biobank or one that has a focus in cancer, there is a national bank that is dedicated to the collection of samples from TYA patients and it is called the Vivo Biobank. Their website is https://vivobiobank.org/. If samples are collected for research upfront, the Vivo biobank gives an 8 week ‘deferred consent’ option, within which time patients are able to consent retrospectively.
