The VCB offers a wide range of prospective collection services to provide biospecimens that are critical for you to make groundbreaking scientific discoveries.
Flexibility is at the core of our approach— whether it’s a provision of freshly excised tissue, or blood samples from a rare cohort like liver cancer, we will try our best to facilitate. We support donor selection, consent, samples collection, processing, distribution and storage.
Located at major hospitals across Melbourne and integrated into the local hospital ecosystems, our VCB sites are strategically positioned to facilitate seamless collaboration and access to a diverse pool of high-quality clinical samples. All our sites operate within a harmonised ethical framework (e.g. consent protocol) to ensure interoperability of samples from across the consortium for you project.
We understand each project is unique and may have specific needs, therefore we are keen to discuss and come up a solution for you. Please reach out to us to discuss on whether we can assist you through prospective collections. Below are some of the common services we provide for prospective collections.
Common services for prospective collections
Biospecimens
- Recruitment
- Case Selection and Consent
- Whole Blood and Derivates
- Collection
- Processing (Plasma, Serum, Buffy Coat, PBMNC)
- Solid Tissue
- Collection
- Processing (Snap Frozen Tissue, FFPE/OCT)
- Slide (H&E, FFPE)
Logistics
- Storage Management (Freezer, LN)
Associated Clinical Data
- De-identified pathology report
- Questionnaire
- Diagnosis*
- Staging and grading
- Therapy and medication data
- Follow up data
*Diagnosis and death data are linked with the VCR.
Cost recovery schedule
The VCB will take into consideration any material that we can bank for use with other projects collected through your projects prospective collection. As a result, we will reduce the cost appropriately. It is therefore important to consider what material is necessary for your project and what can be shared for other research purposes.
Please refer to the Services price list to get an impression of how much a service will cost if no material is to be shared.
Case selection and consent: For project case selection and consent, the VCB will assess the complexity of the request and whether there are other projects that may benefit from this material when determining pricing.
Blood collection and processing: For blood collection and processing, the service fee is reduced reflective of the volume that the VCB can bank.
Tissue Collection and processing: For tissue collection and processing, the service fee is reduced reflective of the volume that the VCB can bank.
Bundle data discount: Accessing clinical data and keeping them up to date is a time-consuming task. We encourage carefully planning out the required data to avoid multiple data retrieval requests.
Therefore, data requests involving multiple items will receive a data bundle discount. The first two higher price data items are charged at full price, with subsequent items being discounted at 50%.
Additionally, we encourage planning out the required clinical data before collection begins, as this will further save time and costs when collecting clinical data items. Consequently, for data items outlined before prospective collection, we offer an additional Prospective data discount of 10%
Project Application: Project application handling, including project application documentation review, submission to access committee, and establishment of standard agreement (if successful). Extensive negotiations of agreement are subject to additional legal negotiation charges.
Project Management: In certain cases, a project management fee will be necessary. This will be thoroughly discussed with projects in question before agreements are made and will be charged only if administrative services exceed 1h per month.