Establishing a Biospecimen Repository of Diverse Populations in a Network Healthcare Organization

Background The Sutter Health Biobank in Northern California, USA is a health system biorepository which collects, processes, stores, and distributes human blood samples to support precision medicine research and translational studies for individualized medicine. Methods The Sutter Health Biobank developed in-person and electronic recruitment methods to enroll participants starting in April, 2017. A Biobank-specific informed consent was developed with key stakeholders including institutional review board, privacy and information security, legal, research, and clinical partners to address several patient concerns, including privacy and the appropriate use of samples for research. Participants were enrolled from numerous affiliates across Sutter Health’s geographically dispersed care system in northern California. Results The Sutter Health Biobank invited 331,922 potential participants meeting inclusion/exclusion criteria and enrolled 12,054 participants between April 7, 2017 and December 31, 2022. Whole blood, serum, and plasma samples were collected from 8,510 (70.6%) consented participants, while 3,716 (43.7%) of sampled participants have two or more longitudinal sample collections. The timeframe from consent to initial sample collection ranged from same day to 4.5 years. In addition, 95.1% of participants completed self-reported general health questionnaire. Conclusions As demonstrated by the successful establishment and utilization of the Sutter Health Biobank, samples and EHR data can be used for various types of precision medicine research. The general population Sutter Health Biobank can serve as a stand-alone discovery cohort and also as a control for case-control or case-cohort studies involving disease-specific populations.