GlobalTrace, the specimen tracking and chain of custody solution from Veridix AI – the technology, data and AI arm of the Emmes Group – is being offered to global customers as a standalone service. The CRO expects new markets to be a key part of its growth strategy as biobanking and related biospecimen shipping services seek more robust solutions – particularly as a new report highlights the risk factors associated with current inventory management approaches.
The system enables central oversight and control of biological specimen assets, regardless of the number of sites and their locations, from the moment of collection until final disposition. GlobalTrace is purpose-built to track every step of the specimen’s journey in real-time when sample integrity and chain of custody are critical. The information recorded includes specimen attributes, links to clinical data, current & previous locations, shipment workflow, issue management and, crucially, can also monitors aliquoted/pooled specimens – a major drawback with current EDC approaches that fail record specimen lineage.
In contrast, GlobalTrace simplifies and automates tasks performed by all of the specimen processors. Tracking residual volume as well as consent for future use, meaning sponsors know whether specimens are available for testing under current protocol(s) or are being allocated for use in future studies.
Biobanking centers are potentially a key beneficiary of the new service with the report pointing to inefficiencies in manual tracking, disjointed inventory systems, and manual reconciliation and error correction as major areas of concern. With the increasing demand for biobanking services – predicted to reach $90bn within the next ten years[1] – advanced inventory management systems have become critical to the roll-out of the greater scale needed.
Cell and gene therapy delivery is, in fact, another major area where currently digital tracking solutions are needed replace the paper-based documentation often used in clinical trials. Especially, as they require removing cells from a patient or donor, modifying them, and then reintroducing to a patient. These can be costly treatments and require a robust tracking and chain of custody solution.
While GlobalTrace was developed for use in clinical trials – where it has tracked an impressive1 million samples – its use across biobanking, vaccine supply and blood banking centres offers a far more robust solution than is presently available to many of these providers. It enables centres’, pharma company, healthcare provider or any stakeholder (with appropriate permissions) to track a specimen – and, significantly, its lineage and conditions – across the entire journey from patient to center [and back again in the case of autologous therapies].
“Our new report identified biobanking as another critical supply chain that could be made safe and more transparent with the real time tracking. So with the rise in the number of samples taken globally we have opened up GlobalTrace as standalone, and already we are seeing strong interest from biobanking centers, hospital networks and pharma companies looking for robust and scalable chain of custody solutions,” added Manjunath Shanabag, Veridix AI VP of Sales