Biobank and Pathology Facility: A Successful Combination.

Abstract

Financial sustainability in biobanks has recently become a key issue globally, as biorepositories struggle to balance limited external funding and high operating costs.To maximize governance and operational efficiency, the Pathology Facility and the University College London (UCL)/UCL Hospitals Biobank for Studying Health and Disease ("the Biobank") have been grouped together under the same management at the UCL Cancer Institute. This paper explores the operational and financial interaction between the Pathology Facility and the Biobank over a period of 3 years (2017-2019). Since 2017, only a minority of the requests included collection of samples from the archive or molecular biology services, and most of the requests included histology services. Our data confirmed the difficulty for a biobank to achieve financial sustainability. The integration of the Pathology Facility with the Biobank within a single laboratory management and delivery infrastructure was shown to be an effective management option and presented a unique opportunity to overcome financial and operational challenges, thus improving efficiency and lowering costs for both parties.