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Tissue Banking

 

SingHealth Tissue Repository (STR) was established to store Human Biological Material (HBM) to facilitate medical research, which may be valuable in preventing, treating, and/or curing human diseases in the future. STR ensures the harvesting, processing and storage of HBM is in accordance with national legislation such as Personal Data Protection Act and Human Biomedical Research Act 2015 of Singapore.

STR supports project-based collection for Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved Human Biomedical Research which includes harvesting of tissue and/or processing of blood and other fluid samples according to the research protocol and storing them for the duration of the project.  

STR also performs tissue banking activity for future research which involves regularly harvesting tissues, mainly malignancies, from consented patients who undergo surgery. Clinical departments or specialties can initiate the collection and banking of HBM of interest with STR.

A high level of tissue quality is essential to avoid introducing inconsistencies and variables into research studies. Therefore, quality check is performed on the harvested tissues by well-trained pathology professionals before they are supplied for research.

Researchers may submit an application request to STR to withdraw HBM existing in the bank for their research project. STR Tissue Release Committee will review and approve the requests. In most situations, research studies conducted using HBM are required to have an approved IRB application. STR encourages PIs who request for contributed tissues to collaborate with the contributing clinicians or departments.

For research studies which require collaboration with pathologists, please refer to the list of SingHealth pathologists of different specialties here.  

For enquiries on STR's samples or services, please contact tissue.repository@singhealth.com.sg.

For SingHealth staff, please visit OpenSpecimen page on SingHealth intranet (http://openspecimen-str/) to check on sample availability.