Background: The Leading Minds in the World

The University of Sheffield is a globally reputed university renowned for its world-leading research. It not only stands out to be in the top 10 per cent of all UK universities—as assessed by the 2014 Research Excellence Framework system—but is also a world top-100 university, that strives to solve society’s greatest challenges through its excellence, impact, unique teaching and distinctiveness for its research-led learning.

The Sheffield Biorepository is Human Tissue Authority (HTA) licensed and provides a fully compliant, safe and secure storage facility for all kinds of human samples. Primarily, these include blood (buffy coat, serum, and plasma), saliva, cerebrospinal and other fluids, urine, and whole tissue sections. The storage facility houses inventory at temperatures ranging from cold storage at 4°C to -20°C, several -80°C freezer banks and liquid nitrogen large storage tanks, as well as, room temperature slide cataloguing and formalin fixed samples. Their primary mission is to deliver high quality sample storage services with samples maintained as per the standard regulatory guidelines.

Challenges: Why the Sheffield Biorepository sought an automated LIMS

The Sheffield Biorepository stores more than 300,000 human tissue samples received from researchers. These samples are stored for two purposes: firstly, for use in future research projects, and secondly, before a research project has obtained ethical approval. Maintaining the biographic information for several samples each day—through every sample's life cycle—using spreadsheets was becoming error-prone.

Steven Haynes, Core Facility Manager for the Sheffield Biorepository was commissioned by Dr. Franco di Giovine, Facility Director, to identify the facility’s major requirements for an automated tracking system:

Meticulous record keeping is essential for each and every stored sample in order to serve customer demands on time.

The data should be kept confidential per university and regulatory compliance standards.

A cost-effective biorepository data management software should be identified to manage laboratory operations.

To meet the above requirements they sought a LIMS implementation to readily identify and quickly trace samples in the biorepository.

CloudLIMS Solution: Why the Sheffield Biorepository chose to evaluate a cloud-based LIMS

In recent times, cloud technology has emerged as a viable alternative to on-premise solutions. The Sheffield Biorepository analyzed the benefits of cloud based software against on-site solutions to find the best application that could cater for their needs. Evidently, with cloud software characteristics such as no new infrastructure requirement, minimal product maintenance, remote disaster recovery, anytime-anywhere access and extensive scalability, the Sheffield Biorepository comprehended that a cloud solution would be ideal and cost-effective. After thorough consideration, they decided to look for a cloud based LIMS with the required functionality, rather than a more traditional server based LIMS system.