Background: The Leeds Biobanking and Sample Processing Lab (LBSPL) is based at St James's University Hospital and is an important element in the Leeds Clinical Research Facility (LCRF). LBSPL is dedicated to providing a sample processing service for clinical trials, and for many biobanking activities within the University and Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust. These currently include collections of tissue, and fluid samples such as blood and urine obtained from consented patients diagnosed with kidney, bladder, colorectal and ovarian cancer, brain tumours, and patients undergoing renal transplant. These are processed and stored in research tissue banks (Leeds Multidisciplinary RTB and Leeds NIHR Biomarker RTB) and used as a valuable resource for wider research activities. The Leeds Multidisciplinary Research Tissue Bank (RTB) was given favourable ethical opinion by the Leeds (East) Research Ethics Committee on 3rd March 2010 and renewed 5 years later (Current REC ref: 15/YH/0080).

Current situation: The LBSPL provides ongoing sample processing support to a variety of local or commercial clinical trials requiring samples to be collected for PK/PD endpoints or other associated translational studies. The Leeds Multidisciplinary RTB currently holds matched normal and malignant frozen renal tissue samples from ~600 patients with renal cancer, and plasma, serum, buffy coat and urine samples from ~800 renal cancer patients either prior to surgery/treatment or during treatment, for example with sunitinib. In addition, fluid samples have been collected from patients with benign urological conditions, healthy controls, patients prior to and following renal transplant A population-based TMA including tissue from ~300 RCC patients has also been established. From having solely a renal focus, the RTB has expanded to now also include frozen normal tissue samples, and frozen tissue and urine samples from >1, 000 patients with bladder cancer, frozen tissue from patients with brain tumours and limited samples from patients with ovarian cancer or colorectal cancer (no new collections ongoing in these areas). The Leeds NIHR BioRTB has closed to recruitment and contains a bank of fluid samples from patients with liver disease, renal cancer and patient undergoing renal transplantation. These were collected as part of a multicentre initiative in the UK, together with associated clinical data, and are intended for use in biomarker validation studies.

Sample processing and clinical data: Samples are processed according to the relevant quality controlled Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) within Good Clinical Practice (GCLP) laboratories. The dedicated sample processing team of laboratory technicians, administrative staff and a Quality Assurance manager works together to ensure that all samples are handled, processed, stored and tracked to the highest standards. The samples are stored accordingly at the correct temperature (e.g. snap frozen tissue in liquid nitrogen, plasma, serum and buffy coats at -80oC). All freezers and liquid nitrogen dewars which hold patient samples are monitored using the Tutela system, a 24/7 web-based alert response temperature monitoring system. Full clinical data is being collected using CRFs. Follow-up data and data available later such as pathology results are obtained from the relevant hospital records/databases by trained personnel with appropriate access. We hope to move to more automated data linkage in the future through working with the Leeds Institute of Data Analytics.
To find further information about collaborative access to these RTB samples please e-mail Roz Banks or Jo Brown at rtb@leeds.ac.uk.