Table 1.
Acute leukemia specimen banking: New patient registrations versus the number and percentage of specimens banked.
Fig 1.
Patient-tracking, consent-taking, sample reception, and bone marrow acquisition steps involved in acute leukemia biobanking at IHHN, Karachi.
Fig 2.
Distribution of biobank PBMC (a) FFPE (b) and specimens by primary diagnosis.
Fig 3.
ERIC strategies mapped to EPIS process framework, as applied to the pediatric cancer biobank at Indus Hospital & Health Network (IHHN).
Strategies not listed as such in the original work but found useful in our implementation experience have been highlighted.
Fig 4.
Quality metrics of PBMC specimens at IHHN, Karachi.
Collection to storage intervals (a) are less than 24 hours for most specimens at present, which is an optimal interval reported by many studies for most functions, though the ideal time reported by others is up to 8 hours following collection. Currently, specimens received before 5 pm are being stored within 8 hours of collection, while this limit is exceeded with specimens arriving after 5 pm as these need to be processed the next day. Collection-storage intervals exceeding 24 hours have mostly been for initial specimens when sample flow, and other protocols were less well defined. Trypan blue viability prior to storage (b) is above 90% for most specimens, but a range of pre-storage viabilities are nevertheless observed. All specimens are stored as these may have different potential uses. In our experience, cells with up to 70% pre-storage viability give optimum RNA yield and quality for transcriptome sequencing, while it is possible that for more sensitive uses like cell culture, specimens with higher viability will need to be selected. Spectrophotometrically determined wavelength ratios (c) for extracted RNA from specimens shows 260/280 ratio of 1.8-2, and 260/230 of more than 2 for most specimens.