Vanderbilt University Medical Center has opened a state-of-the-art automated biobanking system that can store as many as 10 million biospecimens, including blood and body fluids, tissue, and genetic and protein material, at temperatures down to minus 80 degrees Celsius.
The “BioStore” was purchased from its manufacturer, Massachusetts-based Azenta Life Sciences, with the help of a $2 million grant from the Office of the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and significant institutional funding from VUMC.
BioStore is the centerpiece of a comprehensive, automated shared resource to which VUMC has committed more than $5 million for storing, managing, and protecting biospecimen repositories that are critical to advancing personalized medicine, cancer research, and vaccine development, among other fields.
Click to read more.