Problems and Their Solutions in University Hospitals Providing Tissue to the Public Human Tissue Bank for Research Use

Since the importance of human tissue in the research for therapeutics and drug development has been widely recognized, the frequency of human tissue use for research has increased. The Human Science Research Resources Bank (HSRRB) has been established by the Japan Health Sciences Foundation as the first bank of human tissue for research in Japan. This public bank supplies human tissues for medical research to the scientists in Japan. To collect the human tissue for this bank, St. Marianna University School of Medicine has established an in-house institutional bank system as the human tissue supplier. The job clinical research coordinator, and a newly formatted informed consent and masking system of personal information by a special security manager have all been introduced, and high-quality tissue storage was installed for this system. The details of our system is described in the present paper; the problems encountered and countermeasures for such problems are also discussed.