Biotrust: a comprehensive system for acquiring and distributing biospecimens.

The Biotrust resource provides a web- accessible methodto coordinate discovery and request of annotated biospecimensfor research. The system is built on an open-source web-application framework, and has a modular approach to defining education on process, studyregistration and feasibility review, patient identification and cohort forwarding, consent tracking, and biospecimenprocessing/distribution. The architecture has been designed as a “pass through” system that provides annotated deidentified biospecimensfor investigator use in a restricted time window of 4–7 days, and does not maintain biobankingfacilities. As a core institutional resource, the system integrates seven vertical service arms, each of which can be accessed independently to support flexible and independent use in translational research. The system will be described in terms of requirements for use, metrics of evaluation, and lessons learned in integrating this into clinical and operational environments.