Demonstration of a frozen sample aliquotter to prepare plasma and serum aliquots without thawing frozen parent samples.

Abstract

Human biospecimens represent invaluable resources to advance molecular medicine, epidemiology, and biomarker discovery/validation, among other biomedical research. Biobanks typically cryopreserve biospecimens to safeguard their biochemical composition. However, exposing specimens repeatedly to freeze/thaw cycles can degrade their integrity in unforeseen ways. Those biobanks storing liquid samples, thus, regularly make a fundamental compromise at collection time between freezing samples in many small volumes (e.g., 0.5 mL or smaller) or in fewer, larger volumes (e.g., 1.8 mL). The former eliminates the need to expose samples to repeated freeze/thaw cycling, although increasing up-front labor costs, consumables used, and cold storage space requirements. The latter decreases up-front labor costs, consumables, and cold storage requirements, yet exposes samples repeatedly to damaging freeze/thaw cycles when smaller aliquots are needed for analysis. The Rhode Island BioBank at Brown University (RIBB) thoroughly evaluated the performance of an original technology that minimizes a sample's exposure to freeze/thaw cycling by enabling the automated extraction of frozen aliquots from one single frozen parent sample without thawing it. A technology that eliminates unnecessary sample exposures to freeze/thaw cycles could help protect sample integrity, extend its useful life, and effectively rectify and eliminate the aforementioned need to compromise. This report presents the results of the evaluation, and conclusively demonstrates the technology's ability to extract multiple uniform frozen aliquots from a single cryotube of never-thawed frozen human plasma, which faithfully represent the parent sample when analyzed for typical biochemical analytes, showing a coefficient of variability lower than 5.5%.