Services

The Partners Biobank provides plasma, serum, and DNA samples collected from patients who have provided their consent. A research protocol from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) is required in order to obtain samples.

The samples are linked to data from the Electronic Medical Record (EMR), including encounter detail, demographics, diagnoses, laboratory data, microbiology, radiology tests, pathology tests, medications, and health history. Additional survey data on lifestyle, environment and family history is available on a subset of consented subjects. The additional information includes education, physical activity, smoking, employment status, place of employment, sun sensitivity, alcohol use, body mass index, sleep duration, reproductive factors (for women) and family history.

Sample requests may be made in the Research Patient Data Repository (RPDR) or in the new Biobank Portal. The Biobank Portal is a query tool that provides access to extensive clinical data, survey data, sample attributes, as well as cohorts of calculated healthy controls and validated disease populations. The healthy controls are calculated with the Charlson Comorbidity Index and may be further refined to exclude specific clinical criteria. The validated disease populations are defined with statistical algorithms that leverage natural language processing. To date, the validated disease populations include: Bipolar Disorder, Congestive Heart Failure, Coronary Artery Disease, Crohn’s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus, and Ulcerative Colitis. More disease populations will be validated in the future.

In addition, the Partners Biobank works with investigator collaborators to develop collaborative recruitment, consent, and sample collection programs in an effort to reduce the overall costs of research activities. As part of these collaborations, additional sample types, such as RNA from PAXgene tubes, may be obtained at the time patients provide their samples.