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STR-NCCS Satellite Tissue Bank



The STR-NCCS Satellite Tissue Bank (SB) was set up in 2019 as a satellite of the SingHealth Tissue Repository to serve the needs of NCCS researchers. It is a centralised facility within NCCS that can be used for banking of Human Biological Material (HBM). The stored HBM form part of the STR-NCCS-SB catalogue which can be used for future research as the HBM collected and banked can be drawn by requestors for their research studies. 

STR-NCCS-SB is building a comprehensive and well annotated master database of HBM collected with consent for future research. This HBM have linked multi-omics data which can be shared among researchers adding value to analysis previously performed on the specimens. The accompanying collection workflow fosters collaboration, encourages knowledge and resource sharing, and enhances large collaborative grant research capabilities. It thus empowers synergistic research and facilitates serendipity. 

The master HBM database of specimens can be further aggregated with the Data Computational Science clinical research database and the ANCHOR and ANCHORAGE databases to create a dataset that is well aggregated with both tissue and clinical data. ANCHOR and ANCHORAGE allows for research studies that analyse archival Formalin-Fixed Paraffin-Embedded tissue specimens with mature clinical outcome information. This supplements frozen HBM aggregated within STR-NCCS-SB. 

STR-NCCS-SB has also set up a centralised healthy volunteer database for NCCS research studies to recruit healthy volunteers in Singapore who must be 21 years and above who have not been diagnosed with cancer in the past 10 years. These efforts serve to establish a Health Volunteer Database for NCCS which can be tapped on for recruitment into research studies. The volunteers in the database will be matched according to criteria indicted by the respective research studies. 

STR-NCCS-SB strives to expand the Healthy Volunteer Database to create a larger pool of health volunteers available for recruitment. This allows for the planning and development of more research studies which have strict criteria for healthy volunteers. It also facilitates restraint in contacting the same healthy volunteer across multiple studies within a short timeframe. Over time, STR-NCCS-SB hopes to build a robust Healthy Volunteer Database which can be useful to researchers within NCCS.