iSpecimen Marketplace 2.0 was recently launched. The newly enhanced platform remains free for researchers and suppliers to join. The Marketplace 2.0 now provides access to 25 million clinical remnants annually.
Founded in 2012, the marketplace for human biospecimens, iSpecimen has its head office in Lexington, Massachusetts, USA. The company aims to provide researchers with the samples they need from the most appropriate sources.
The online platform called iSpecimen Marketplace was developed to connect healthcare institutions such as hospitals, which generate surplus biomaterial, that would otherwise go to waste, with scientists in need of samples for their health research.
The marketplace is cloud-based and allows users to search the iSpecimen database of partnered hospitals, labs, biobanks, blood centres, and other healthcare organisations. The platform allows scientists to access regulatory compliant specimens easily, and iSpecimen partners contribute to advancing healthcare research and are compensated for doing so. Patients, scientists and healthcare organisations win.
Since the iSpecimen Marketplace’s launch one year ago, hundreds of biotech, pharmaceutical, and academic institutions have signed on at no cost as marketplace users, collectively conducting thousands of searches across millions of patients and samples available for research.
The benefits of iSpecimen Marketplace 2.0 include:
- End-to-end order management for suppliers
- Automated order management
- Easy onboarding. Suppliers can more easily share detailed data about their inventories and individual specimens with researchers thanks to powerful new data integration capabilities in the marketplace
- Improved workflow. The marketplace now automatically focuses suppliers on their most urgent tasks, such as new requests, pending orders, and approaching deadlines
- More specificity in specimen requests. iSpecimen Marketplace 2.0 enables researchers to search by new parameters that include histology, and tumor/disease-specific biomarkers
- Guided search. Context-based functionality now prompts researchers to specify minimum specimen requirements to ensure a resulting order would be ready for suppliers to execute
- Order tracking. Researchers can now view their specimen order status in real time, with optional automated alerts, as orders move from collection into shipment and delivery
- Compliance. The iSpecimen Marketplace manages compliance
“Health care organizations are increasingly called upon to share the millions of specimens they handle with researchers who desperately need them for their vital work,” … “Historically, though, sharing has been complex and difficult, even within an institution’s own walls. iSpecimen Marketplace 2.0 significantly advances our mission of making it simple for both sides to connect, discover and share.”
“Specimen sharing, just like knowledge sharing, is essential for medicine to progress at the rate we should expect in this exciting era of genomics and big data.” … “Patients expect the samples they provide are helping the cause of medical progress. That’s why we are continuing to knock down the obstacles one by one.” – Christopher Ianelli, MD, PhD, iSpecimen Founder and CEO
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