Opinion: STAT+: We need a universal approach to sharing biomedical samples

Three years ago, I was working at a biotech company leading a drug discovery program focused on metabolic disease. Interested in obtaining liver samples that could help identify potential therapeutic targets, I learned that a tenured professor at a top 10 NIH institution had more than 2,000 samples of tissue from patients they had accumulated over more than a decade of research. I reached out to assess whether we might find a way to possibly collaborate, using their samples to help accelerate our program and providing new insights for samples the professor had yet to evaluate.

The partnership never got off the ground. But one element of the conversation stuck. When I asked the professor what their plans were for the samples — did they hope to work with them when they secured additional funding or share them with others? — they noted they had no plan. In short, they had samples. Intended to collect more of them. And had no immediate plans to do anything with them.

This is common. Those of us in research routinely store patient samples — blood, fluids, tissue, scrapings, and other biological materials — collected during clinical care. The National Bioethics Advisory Commission estimates there are more than 280 million samples in the United States, with more than 20 million added annually.

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