Central tissue and specimen bank
Transplant patient care and follow-up result necessarily in a huge amount of clinical specimens, including transplant biopsies, blood samples, urine samples, biliary fluid samples, and broncho-alveolar lavage specimens. Solid-organ transplants are commonly followed by means of biopsies obtained for specific clinical indications. Protocol biopsy programmes after organ transplantation are established. The continuous prospective processing and archiving of these specimens, along with accompanying samples of blood, urine, biliary, and broncho-alveolar lavage fluid, is an administrative task of considerable logistical proportions. Moreover, archiving the necessary clinical information of each and every patient involved requires a data and bioinformatics platform that is constructed within the IFB-Tx.