LiMeTrack: A lightweight biosample management platform for the multicenter SATURN3 consortium

Biomedical research projects involving large patient cohorts are increasingly complex, both in terms of data modalities and number of samples. Such projects require robust data management solutions to foster data integrity, reproducibility and secondary use compliant with the FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) principles. SATURN3, a national German consortium with 17 project partner sites investigates intratumoral heterogeneity in three hard-to-treat cancers using patient biosamples actively collected at six project centers. The complex multicenter workflow of SATURN3 thereby includes multiple analyte types across bulk and single-cell sequencing, and spatial omics technologies.

To avoid the risk of data loss and de-synchronization across the partner sites, metadata harmonization and documentation in a central infrastructure is essential. In addition, real-time monitoring of the processing status of the samples must be transparently accessible to all project partners throughout the project. This use case goes far beyond the documentation capabilities of spreadsheets or locally shared files that are susceptible to security vulnerabilities, versioning mistakes, data loss and type conversion errors. Existing data management tools are often too complex to set up or lack the necessary flexibility to be adopted for specific project needs.

To address these challenges, we introduce LiMeTrack, an online biosample management platform with customizable and user-friendly data entry schemes and a real-time dashboard for providing an overview of project and sample status. LiMeTrack simplifies the creation and export of standardized sample sheets, streamlining subsequent bioinformatics analyses and biomedical research workflows. By integrating real-time monitoring with robust sample tracking and data management, LiMeTrack improves research transparency and reproducibility, ensures data integrity and optimizes workflows, making it a powerful solution for sample management in modern multicenter biomedical research scenarios.