St Vincent's Collection Centre

Site location: St Vincent's Hospital, Darlinghurst, Eastern Sydney

Local contact: A/Prof Adrienne Morey

Date of operations (date of formal start of current bank operation): July 2006

Date range of cases: July 2007–present

Example input statistics:

Overall response to consent (Yes%/No%/Unknown %): 85% Yes

Total individual cases held: 625

% cases associated with fresh-frozen tumor biospecimens: 13%

% cases with paraffin embedded biospecimens: 91%

% cases with blood and blood derivatives: 98%

In your view, what are the most valuable/highest priority cases in your biobanks?

Cases in which all components can be collected: blood, plenty of fresh tumor as well as paraffin blocks - particularly if it is an unusual type of carcinoma.

What are your major challenges?

1) Getting the consenting done! Patients spend so little time actually in hospital, it can be hard getting to them pre-operatively. The role of the breast care nurses in taking on this role has been critical for us - but adversely impacted by staffing changes and necessity for repeated re-training.

2) Getting fresh tumor: difficult in small lesions, and requires logistic coordination.

3) Synoptic information required by the bank is not always easy to extract from pathology reports: should improve with mandatory structured reporting.

What would you do with $1 million to improve the value of your biobanks?

Having dedicated banking technicians in all major hospitals would assist not only the breast bank but other banks too. The breast bank has been more successful than many other banks because it has provided financial support to pathology departments to undertake this work, rather than expecting it to be done gratis.