Biobank and Big Data Core

Washington University, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY BBDC The overarching mission of the WU-DDRCC is to promote collaborative, multidisciplinary research focused on interactions between host and environment in digestive disease. The newly reconfigured Biobank Big Data (BBD) Core, formerly the Biobank Core, promotes clinical translational research across a spectrum of digestive diseases by (1) Assisting in navigating institutional review board (IRB) guidelines for human research; (2) Identifying and consenting patients, process, store and rapidly retrieve specimens and clinical metadata for high throughput analysis; (3) Developing pipelines for high quality downstream analysis building on prior collections of patients/specimens to promote statistically robust outcomes for a research projects; (4) Providing expert consultation on the study design, data access, and analyses from large-scale cohorts and biobanks, ensuring robust and methodologically sound design; (5) Supporting large-scale analyses of human data for clinical, epidemiological, outcomes and translational research in digestive diseases throughout the life course. Accomplishments and highlights since 2019: 1)Training and retaining personnel to maintain an open IRB protocol with a one-time lifetime e-consent, to identify patients, collect and process specimens and clinical metadata, and establish pipelines for downstream data generation and analysis, 2) developing material transfer agreements to allow specimens and data to be efficiently shared 3) enrolling over 8,300 participants (total since 2009) from over 14 digestive disease categories as of 10/01/23 4) collecting ~16,000 specimens (~12,000 specimens and ~50,000 derivatives currently housed in the archival data set) with clinical metadata, performed genotype analysis with results available to members to jumpstart studies 5) developing and maintaining relationships with human studies committee to write, execute, maintain, and report to granting agencies on over 20 IRB protocols for members in a rapid, efficient, and cost-effective manner, 6) supporting 17 members including 10 ongoing prospective collections or clinical trials, resulting in 60 peer reviewed publications (48/60 with ≥2 members) citing the Core, including Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine, and Gut. Based upon the above and to continue to pursue this mission we propose the following specific aims: Aim 1: Develop and maintain an archival specimen set linked with clinical metadata to help design and rapidly support retrospective studies and jump start prospective studies of human digestive disease by members. Aim 2: Develop and maintain the infrastructure to help design, support, and efficiently execute prospective studies with/without involving biospecimen collections in human digestive disease by members. Aim 3: Develop and maintain the infrastructure to support large scale patient-based human digestive disease across multiple institutions (including other DDRCCs) throughout the United States. Aim 4: Establish and maintain the infrastructure to support the design, access, and analyses of large-scale human digestive disease studies leveraging existing cohorts and biobanks worldwide.