Biotrust: a comprehensive system for acquiring and distributing biospecimens.

The Biotrust resource provides a web-accessible method to coordinate discovery and request of annotated biospecimens for research. The system is built on an open-source web-application framework, and has a modular approach to defining education on process, study registration and feasibility review, patient identification and cohort forwarding, consent tracking, and biospecimen processing/distribution. The architecture has been designed as a "pass through" system that provides annotated deidentified biospecimens for investigator use in a restricted time window of 4-7 days, and does not maintain biobanking facilities. As a core institutional resource, the system integrates seven vertical service arms, each of which can be accessed independently to support flexible and independent use in translational research. The system will be described in terms of requirements for use, metrics of evaluation, and lessons learned in integrating this into clinical and operational environments.