The Imperial College Healthcare Tissue Bank (ICHTB) infrastructure enables researchers from Imperial to collect, store and use human tissue samples. Tissue samples, such as blood and tumour samples, are collected from patients, always with the patients’ full written consent. These samples are used to answer research questions, approved by the Tissue Banks’ Application Review Panel.
The iCARE Team works with the Imperial College Healthcare Tissue Bank, to provide additional medical data for the patients that have consented to give tissue samples to the ICHTB. This medical data is collected for these patients in the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust’s Electronic Healthcare Record. This allows the Tissue Bank to gain a much broader understanding of the medical history for these patients. It also allows researchers to conduct more in-depth research, as they can select the patient cohorts for their research based on patient phenotype (someone’s observable physical features e.g. hair colour) and genotype (an individual’s collection of genes).