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The Research Centre for Women’s and Infants’ Health (RCWIH) BioBank is a biorepository established to support perinatal research programs by providing access to human tissue specimens and associated clinical data which are collected according to the highest ethical standards. Established in 2006 and located in the heart of Toronto’s Discovery District, the RCWIH BioBank is a program of the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute and the Mount Sinai Hospital (MSH)/University Health Network Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology.
Our mission is to support research programs working to:
- Minimize fetal and neonatal death and disability
- Improve the lifelong health of women and their children
- Increase the understanding of placental development, from conception to delivery, and the impact on human health and disease later in life
- Provide new insights into the normal and pathological functions of the embryo, placenta, and maternal systems during pregnancy
- Expand the therapeutic applications for stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood
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The RCWIH BioBank program is represented by the BioBank Director, BioBank Manager and dedicated Clinical Research Associates and Assistants. In addition to the support received from the Research Ethics Board and clinical care team at Mount Sinai Hospital, all of the program’s activities are overseen by the RCWIH BioBank Governance Committee. This committee is comprised of members of the MSH Department of Pathology, the MSH Maternal-Fetal Medicine program in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, investigators and research trainees at the RCWIH, and external advisory members from outside hospitals and the research community. With the collective input from perinatal pathologists, clinicians with expertise in obstetrics, and researchers who utilize the collected specimens and data, the RCWIH BioBank Governance Committee is well-positioned to provide direction and advice on all aspects of the program’s operation.
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The RCWIH BioBank is a non-profit organization and operates on a fee-for-service (cost recovery) basis. There is no cost for the donated tissues themselves. The recovery costs that are applied to samples reflect only the time and materials spent by the RCWIH BioBank program, including the costs associated with:
- Identifying and recruiting participants
- Attending deliveries for tissue procurement
- Tissue processing
- Data collection and preparation of clinical profiles
- Sample archival and distribution
For more information about our cost recovery system please contact our office.
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By handling all aspects of sample procurement and data collection, the RCWIH BioBank provides researchers with:
- Access to fully-characterized human specimens, collected according to Standard Operating Procedures and strict ethical guidelines
- Access to a patient cohort with nearly 7,000 deliveries per year, including rare clinical complications of pregnancy
- 24/7 coverage of high-risk deliveries and clinical trial participants
- Accelerated research progress by retrospective access to archived specimens
- Customized collection services to meet project requirements
Acknowledging the BioBank
Acknowledgement of the RCWIH BioBank in presentations or publications reporting results generated using RCWIH samples is required as a condition of the 'Material Transfer Agreement'. A suitable acknowledgement is as follows:
"The authors thank the donors, the RCWIH BioBank, the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, and the Mount Sinai Hospital/UHN Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology for the human specimens used in this study (https://biobank.lunenfeld.ca)”.
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