
OpenSpecimen, a Krishagni product, is an open source biobanking informatics platform that permits users to enter and retrieve data concerning the collection, storage, quality assurance, and distribution of biospecimens, has announced that The South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI) has implemented the platform to meet the challenge of managing Data for more than 150,000 specimens in their biorepository.
Born out of U.S. National Cancer Institute funding, OpenSpecimen, founded in 2009, headquartered in Pune, India, is an open-source biobanking informatics platform used by more than 55 biobanks across 15 countries. These include Stanford and Johns Hopkins, in the USA, the University of Leicester in the UK, the University of New South Wales and University of Melbourne in Australia, and Singapore General Health.
Established in 2009, located in Adelaide, SAHMRI is South Australia’s first independent flagship health and medical research institute. They are home to more than 700 medical researchers, working together to tackle the biggest health challenges in society today.
SAHMRI’s biorepository stores 150,000+ biospecimens to support their translational research. The biorepository has a central cryogenics facility that stores samples in liquid nitrogen tanks for SAHMRI researchers and collaborators. There are more than sixty -80ºC freezers.
“We chose OpenSpecimen because we heard good feedback from other users. The open-source, browser-based technology fits well within our existing infrastructure. We also liked the fact that OpenSpecimen has an active community here in Australia, and Krishagni offers very good support to users.” … “We worked with the Krishagni to tailor OpenSpecimen to our specific requirements, including sample-centric and participant-centric based collections, storage management, and a sample request module.” … “It’s helped us to be flexible and to cater for the varying needs of the different groups in SAHMRI. Having samples managed in a single system makes life much simpler and removes the issues of managing samples via spreadsheets.” – Matt Lyon, Senior Analyst at SAHMRI
“Working with SAHMRI has been a very interesting experience for us. They are very active in providing community feedback and funding new features. We also conducted an “OpenSpecimen Workshop” in Adelaide in 2018 which had biobankers from SAHMRI and others in Adelaide attend.” – Srikanth Adiga, CEO, OpenSpecimen
Sources
- https://www.openspecimen.org/sahmri-case-study/
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/openspec/about/
- https://www.sahmri.org/who-we-are/