Concept and Research

Much is made in this era of translational research of the need to cross boundaries between biomedical research organizations that individually have insufficient patient-subjects. Concurrently, the noisiness and high dimensionality of genome scale measurements has made it all the more pressing to increase sample size to overcome problems of false discovery, and irreproducibility that stem in part from insufficiently powered studies. Building on the success of SPIN, the Virtual Specimen Locator (VSL) is a core developed to facilitate translational research requiring human specimens. The VSL is a distributed network of databases containing de-identified information on archived specimens from IRB-approved repositories within Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center affiliated institutions. The VSL allows an investigator to use a single web-browser interface to identify and locate specimens appropriate for his/her research project, across the Harvard community.