WIA Bio-Banking Standard Guide

A tube of frozen plasma looks simple. Whether it is still worth anything ten years from now depends on decisions made in the first few hours after it left the donor, on a freezer nobody thinks about until it fails, and on a paper trail that has to survive staff turnover, software migrations and audits. This chapter lays down the domain vocabulary and the physical facts on which the rest of WIA-BIO-019 is built.

A biobank is an organization, or a unit inside one, that collects biological material, preserves it under controlled conditions, keeps the information that makes the material interpretable, and releases both to authorized users. ISO 20387:2018, the international standard for biobanking, frames it in the same spirit: biobanking covers acquisition and storage together with the surrounding activities of collection, preparation, preservation, testing, analysis and distribution of defined biological material and its associated data. The word "bank" fits better than it first seems. A bank takes deposits it does not own outright, keeps them safe for an indefinite period, keeps a ledger that can be audited, and lets things out only under rules agreed at the moment of deposit.