Best Practice BioBanking of Human Heart Tissue

Abstract

This review provides a guide to researchers who wish to establish a biobank. It also gives practical advice to investigators seeking access to samples of healthy or diseased human hearts. We begin with a brief history of the Sydney Heart Bank (SHB) from when it began in 1989, including the pivotal role played by the late Victor Chang. We discuss our standard operating procedures for tissue collection which include cryopreservation and the quality assurance needed to maintain the long-term molecular and cellular integrity of the samples. The SHB now contains about 16,000 heart samples derived from over 450 patients who underwent isotopic heart transplant procedures and from over 100 healthy organ donors. These enable us to provide samples from a wide range of categories of heart failure. So far, we have delivered heart samples to more than 50 laboratories over two decades, and we answer their most frequently asked questions. Other SHB services include the development of tissue microarrays (TMA). These enable end users to perform preliminary examinations of the expression and localisation of target molecules in diseased or aging donor hearts, all in a single section of the TMA. Finally, the processes involved in managing tissue requests from external users and logistics considerations for the shipment of human tissue are discussed in detail.

Fig. 1

The number of healthy donor hearts available in the SHB and their age (in the columns) distribution. Total number of donor hearts is 121. These hearts were surplus to the needs of the St Vincent’s Hospital Heart transplant Program

Fig. 2

The red dots indicate the cities in which the Sydney Heart Bank has more than 50 global collaborating laboratories. Often, more than one collaborating laboratory is represented in each city (e.g. Baltimore, Boston, Rochester in the USA, Amsterdam, London, Oxford, Dublin and Stockholm in Europe, Tokyo and Singapore in Asia, and in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide and Perth in Australia and in Auckland and Dunedin in New Zealand

Fig. 3

The connections between key words in research papers produced by the SHB and its collaborators. On the left, we cover a wide range of forms of heart failure (blue boxes), myocardial repair and regenerations (red) the impact of atrial fibrillations (orange), and oxidative stress (lilac). These are compared to a wide range of healthy donor heart (black). On the right, we list research topics we focus on keywords arising from all >80 SHB publications (listed in the Supplementary reference) over the past two decades. The topics include changes in and modifications of sarcomeric protein (purple), cytoskeletal proteins (blue-green), and defects in myocardial membranes (green)