Our services

Tissue types
The Bank can supply an extensive range of fresh, frozen and formalin fixed paraffin embedded tissue collected from cardiothoracic procedures including, but not limited to:

• Adipose tissue
• Aorta 
• Biopsies
• Blood Blood vessels (cardiac, peripheral and pulmonary)
• Heart valves
• Lung
• Myocardium
• Sputum
• Tumours

The Tissue Bank also holds a number of longitudinal collections of whole blood and plasma from patient cohorts donated over a number of years. For further enquiries about these please email papworth.tissuebank@nhs.net.

The Bank’s staff work closely with surgeons, specialist nurses, theatre staff and pathologist/histopathologist to collect, store and process tissue in accordance with a project’s protocol.

Post mortem samples
It can also supply post-mortem samples of major organs including heart, lung, liver, kidney, spleen and samples from donated transplant organs (i.e. organs unsuitable for transplantation, but with consent for research).

Banking/storage
In addition it can provide a banking service, subject to capacity and an agreed storage fee. For further enquiries about banking projects please email papworth.tissuebank@nhs.net.

National research ethics approval
The Tissue Bank has the authority to issue its own ethics approval to projects wishing to prospectively collect tissue and routine clinical data, as long as the tissue is donated at time of routine procedure.  Projects are accessed by the Tissue Bank Operational Group (TBOG) and are given approval to proceed if they meet the criteria as specified in the Bank’s own research ethics approval:

• Supply of tissue for grant funded research that has been peer reviewed as part of the grant application process
• Supply of tissue for internally funded research projects or industrial collaborations that have been reviewed and supported by the Research and Development directorate
• Supply of tissue for student research that is supported by their academic/clinical supervisors and the TBOG
• Release of tissue to other licensed or ethically approved research tissue banks including those within commercial organisations
• Samples and data are suitably anonymised

Clinical data
A fully anonymised set of routine basic clinical data can be provided with a sample.  If an investigator wishes to receive more detailed data (e.g. serology report) this can also be requested at the time of application to the Tissue Bank and will incur an additional cost.