Guideline on Valuation of Research Biospecimen Collections

Biobanks can consume a lot of financial resources and some biobanks have a poor record of utilization. This suggests the need for better planning by these biobanks around what new biospecimens to collect and store and more deliberate approaches to determine the value of existing biospecimen collections to make operational decisions. Existing biospecimen collections may comprise part of the biobank inventory (where decisions are needed around availability or continued storage) or external collections (where decisions are needed to consider their addition to the inventory). However, there has been limited discussion about how to value these collections. This paper proposes a guideline for the valuation of existing collections based on a two-stage process that involves consideration of features under two broad categories: "ELSI" factors and "Biospecimen and Data" factors. The first "initial-valuation" stage is based on the consideration of five key questions related to each of the main factors and will, in many instances, suffice. This approach can identify salient features of a collection that may have a dominant impact on the value. However, in other instances, a second "extended-valuation" stage may be needed to make a more in-depth assessment of the features of a collection. The overall value can then be summarized and/or assigned a score and compared with valuations of comparable collections. The latter might include another collection occupying a similar storage volume within the biobank, a collection from a similar group of donors, or a similar collection stored by another affiliated biobank. In summary, we hope that these guidelines and discussion serve to highlight key factors and an approach to valuing existing collections to improve biobanking efficiency and sustainability.