iSpecimen announced the expansion of the iSpecimen Marketplace—an online specimen matching platform launched in June of this year that instantly connects life science researchers who need human biospecimens with the healthcare organizations that have them. Hundreds of biotech, pharmaceutical, and academic institutions have signed on as marketplace users, collectively conducting thousands of searches across millions of patients and samples available for research. Initially launched providing access to one million banked samples, the iSpecimen Marketplace now also provides access to 25 million clinical remnants annually.

The iSpecimen Marketplace solves one of the life science industry's biggest challenges—how to efficiently and compliantly procure biospecimens for scientific study, while adhering to rigorous administrative standards around contracting and compliance. The iSpecimen Marketplace has tackled these challenges and fundamentally changed the way specimens are procured—allowing scientists to conduct real-time searches for biofluids, solid tissue, and cells across a vast partner network of contributing hospitals, labs, biobanks and other healthcare organizations.

All specimens procured from within the iSpecimen network are done so in accordance with federal regulations, including HIPAA and the Department of Health & Human Services' Common Rule, with the iSpecimen Marketplace managing compliance activities as part of the matching process. This latest iteration of the iSpecimen Marketplace allows users to instantly download and view compliance documentation on a per-specimen basis, including consent templates and Institutional Review Board (IRB) approvals. This greatly reduces the compliance risks traditionally associated with specimen procurement as users can gain assurance before obtaining specimens that their requested samples were collected with appropriate regulatory oversight and with consent language that meets their unique research requirements.

"Procuring human biospecimens for research has long been a challenge for the scientific community," said LeeAnn Talarico, Principal Investigator at SQZ Biotechnologies, a Massachusetts-based company developing cellular therapies for multiple indications. "The fact that the iSpecimen Marketplace consolidates data from across disparate contributing organizations, harmonizes it, and then provides one easy-to-use, searchable interface for researchers to find and select the specimens they need is groundbreaking. And because of their broad network, we have been able to access harder-to-find specimens much more easily and efficiently, allowing us to save time and move ahead with our research endeavors."

In addition to direct access to banked research samples, the marketplace also now includes access to clinical remnant specimens available across iSpecimen's partner network. Researchers can search across thousands of analytes and user-defined result ranges to view immediately available banked samples as well as gain an accurate representation of future specimen availability using enhanced analytics and data visualization tools. Additionally, researchers can use the marketplace to request custom collections from patients who meet precise inclusion and exclusion criteria and iSpecimen will work with its contributing partners to set up the collections for research purposes. 

"It's extremely fulfilling to see what was once our vision now executed and in use across the research and development community," said Christopher Ianelli, M.D., Ph.D., Founder & CEO of iSpecimen. "Particularly in this age of precision medicine, investigators need samples of varying formats, disease-states, and patient demographics, and they need them fast, efficiently, and compliantly. Our mission is to enable population sampling on the broadest scale that we can so that we can ultimately help researchers tailor treatments and diagnostics to the individual."