Biospecimens are critical for generating the data that drives innovation across healthcare. They enable biomarker discovery, support drug and diagnostic development, and power clinical trials that bring new therapeutics to market. Advances in -omics technologies have further expanded the role of biospecimens in genomic and personalized medicine1,2.
Despite their importance, many researchers purchase biospecimens without full visibility into how they are collected, stored, or characterized. In today’s procurement ecosystem, many biospecimen providers don’t collect or bank samples themselves. Instead, they resell access to material originally biobanked by hospitals, laboratories, or academic institutions. Inventories consolidated through mergers and acquisitions can also unintentionally circulate the same banked samples, adding additional complexity to an already opaque system.
That means a single patient’s tissue or fluid sample can become multiple listings, showing up in different suppliers’ inventory. Because each supplier assigns its own unique sample identifier, researchers risk unknowingly paying multiple times for the same patient sample. This risk is amplified for rare or hard-to-source indications, where multi-sourcing is often necessary to meet study requirements.
The Hidden Risk of Duplicate Patient Samples
Take Researcher A, who required a cohort of 20 Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) patient samples, which they purchased from three different biospecimen suppliers (Figure 1). After noticing an unexpectedly high frequency of uncommon genetic variants, they suspected there were duplicate samples from the same patients in their cohort. Follow-up genetic testing confirmed two pairs of duplicate patients across the three suppliers, which meant they only had samples from 18 unique individuals instead of 20.
