One Sample, Many Sellers: The Hidden Redundancy Undermining Biospecimen Research

When I first started researching the biospecimen industry, I expected complexity. I expected fragmentation. I expected quality to vary.

What I didn’t expect - what truly blew my mind - was how often multiple vendors were offering specimens from the same patient, sometimes the exact same sample, other times just different samples from the same donor.

Yes, you read that right. The exact same sample. the same block, slide, or vial.

From the same patient.

Pitched at different prices.
Marketed with slightly different data.
Sourced from a tangle of partners and resellers who’d all had their hands on it.

The Specimen Grapevine

This discovery was my wake-up call. I started asking:

• How can five different groups have “exclusive access” to the same sample?
• Why is it showing up in so many places?
• How can a researcher trust the data attached to it?

The answer, unfortunately, is the quiet norm of our industry: a complex, informal network of buying, selling, trading, and re-marketing. It’s a world where a specimen donated freely by a patient can pass through multiple commercial layers - each adding markup, introducing risk, and eroding traceability.

This isn’t a knock on any one vendor. It’s a systemic issue. And, it’s one we need to talk about more openly.

How far does the redundancy go?

Putting the multi-channel marketing of a single sample aside, there’s an even deeper issue - one that stems from the same systemic problem.

When multiple samples from the same patient, from the exact same surgery, arrive at your lab from different vendors, a dangerous domino effect unfolds.

You might think you’re sourcing five samples from Vendor A and five from Vendor B - only to discover later (if you’re lucky) that they all came from the same five individuals. Different tissues. Different sample types. But all from a single donor, sold and re-sold so many times that the thread is lost entirely.

The worst part? You often have no way of knowing.

How Does This Happen?

One word: re-identification.

Some biospecimen companies intentionally strip or scramble identifiers - not just to comply with privacy regulations, but to conceal the true origin of their specimens. While some re-ID practices are well-meaning, others are used to mask the source of the specimen, making it nearly impossible for researchers to see when they’re being offered inventory from the same source through different channels.

The result is a tangled, opaque supply chain where:

• Samples get marketed multiple times
• Patient uniqueness is assumed, but never confirmed
• Valuable clinical context is lost in translation
• And traceability? It disappears entirely

It’s a system where a patient who donated their specimen—freely, to advance science—ends up fueling a murky, multi-layered resale ecosystem that prioritizes margin over mission.

What does that mean for you?

• You pay for 10 samples, expecting 10 patients—but get data from 5
• You unknowingly skew your cohort, undermining your study
• You lose trust in your dataset when annotations don’t align
• You waste budget chasing specimens that were never unique to begin with
• And, when it’s time for validation or regulatory review, the lack of traceability becomes a critical red flag

This is more than an inconvenience—it’s a structural flaw that threatens the integrity of research. 

What This Means for Research

This redundancy isn’t just frustrating—it’s expensive, confusing, and harmful to scientific progress.

• Budgets get wasted chasing duplicate samples
• Data integrity suffers when annotations are incomplete, inconsistent, or outdated
• Traceability vanishes, making regulatory validation difficult (if not impossible)
• Patients’ contributions—given in the spirit of advancing science—are reduced to commodities in a convoluted supply chain

It’s messy. It’s icky. It’s one reason biospecimens can feel like one of the most expensive, least transparent line items in a research budget.

What Researchers Actually Need

After navigating this complexity firsthand, I’ve come to believe that what researchers need most is not “more sources.” They need:

Clarity – What exactly is this sample? Where has it been? What data backs it?

Reliability – Will it show up on time? Will it pass QC?

Care – Has anyone actually reviewed the case? Is this specimen fit for purpose?

At Reference Medicine, we made the decision early on to work directly with hospitals and donors, ensuring that the specimens we deliver are fully traceable, clinically and molecularly characterized, and ethically sourced. That’s not just a quality thing—it’s a value thing.

A Call for Transparency

This post isn’t about throwing shade at other companies. It’s about lifting the veil on an issue that has quietly cost our industry time, money, and credibility for too long.

It’s time we stopped pretending that more vendors means more diversity.
It’s time we stopped letting specimens bounce around like baseball cards.
iIt’s time we honored the gift patients give us by building a system that’s honest, ethical, and built for real science.

It starts with transparency. And maybe, just maybe, with one sample appearing in one place—not five.

‍

We owe it to the researchers on the frontlines.

We owe it to the diagnostics teams trying to get tests approved.
And, we owe it to the patients who gave a piece of themselves to make all of it possible.

In the end, one patient should never unknowingly be the foundation of five different “independent” studies.

‍