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ideasIdea

A common consent and material transfer template for tumour biobanks

Every biobank negotiates its own legal agreement for sharing tissue, which takes months. A shared standard template, like Creative Commons for samples, would let tissue and data move in days.

Material transfer agreements are negotiated bespoke; consent forms differ; the result is that tumour samples rarely leave the institution that collected them. A common consent text recognised by ethics committees and a standard tiered MTA (academic, commercial, with fixed benefit-sharing terms) would remove most negotiation. Precedents include the Uniform Biological Material Transfer Agreement (UBMTA) and the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health consent toolkit.

Hypothesis
Adoption of a common template by more than 50 biobanks will cut median time to sample transfer from over six months to under one and increase the number of samples used in multi-centre studies.
Rationale
Standard licences (Creative Commons, open-source software licences) removed negotiation costs and created ecosystems; biobanking has the templates but not the adoption push.
What would test it
Get ten biobanks and their legal offices to adopt the template; track transfer time and volume for 18 months against the previous period.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
research
Cost to try
Small (under $1M)
Years to first evidence
2
Bottlenecks it attacks

Connected

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