iSpecimen Announces Marketplace Expansion
Company increases scale and scope of offerings to meet today’s medical research needs
Lexington, MA – iSpecimen®, a trusted source of customized human biospecimen collections, today announced that it has made sizeable increases to the number and types of clinical organizations participating in its partner network. As a result, the company can now offer scientists faster access to a more diverse array of human biospecimens for medical research. Initially founded as a provider of remnant clinical biospecimens, iSpecimen can additionally source biospecimens collected specifically for research from its partner network that includes hospitals, commercial labs, clinics and practice groups, biorepositories, blood centers, health information exchanges, and clinical research sites. As the number of supply partners has increased in both scale and scope, iSpecimen’s cloud-based technology continues to manage the specimen procurement process from inquiry-to-invoice across this federated network.
With precision medicine surging, and lofty national research initiatives in place such as the Cancer Moonshot, human biospecimens and associated data are now more in demand than ever before. Scientists need highly-specific, customized collections that meet precise inclusion and exclusion criteria that may include medical conditions, test results, treatment history, demographics, and genetic data, and other medical record information. Further, more diverse specimen types with specific collection requirements are in demand—across biofluids, solid tissue, and cells—with many scientists requesting matched sets from each patient they study.
Due to these evolving researcher needs and the iSpecimen value proposition enjoyed by supply partners, the company’s virtual network has expanded to include annual access to more than 25 million remnant specimens and nearly 5 million patient encounters from whom specimens can be prospectively collected with patient consent under institutional review board protocols. In addition, iSpecimen currently has access to hundreds of thousands of biobanked samples. All specimens are sourced with valuable de-identified patient- and specimen-level data, depending on the institution from which they came.
Because iSpecimen’s technology plugs into electronic medical records and is able to harmonize data from disparate sources, a scalable, searchable marketplace is created from which researchers can efficiently make requests. A technological approach also ensures levels of speed and accuracy that traditional manual procurement methods lack. Supply partners benefit as they receive the technology implementation for free and gain an opportunity to contribute to important medical research as well as their bottom line, through a service revenue share with iSpecimen.
“Union Hospital was thrilled to kick off this initiative and begin to reap value that can be put back into care,” said AnneLara, EdD, RN, CNE, CPHIMS, chief information officer of Union Hospital, which gained access to the iSpecimen program through its health information exchange (HIE), the Delaware Health Information Network (DHIN). “As a small community hospital, it’s great to know that we can access such a program through our exchange and help researchers accelerate medical discovery.”
Amer Abhouhamze, MHA, assistant director of the CTSI Biorepository at the University of Florida, said, “We spent a lot of time and energy developing a state-of-the art biorepository that could provide biospecimens to researchers. Because iSpecimen has access to a large customer base of scientists, we work with them to help make our inventory available to the research community at large.”
“We are extremely proud of our network growth and our ability to meet the varying needs of our research customers,” said Christopher Ianelli, MD, PhD, CEO of iSpecimen. “Healthcare providers are also directly reaching out to us now to participate in our partner program, having heard about it through their peers or other market channels. It’s great validation that our technology is driving value for partners, customers, and the improvement of healthcare overall.”
In total, iSpecimen’s partner network today consists of healthcare organizations that collectively encompass more than 250 hospitals and labs, over a thousand clinics and practice groups, more than ten biorepositories, and one large blood center. The network continues to grow, providing biomedical scientists with the high-quality specimens they need from the patients they want.