Lab Leaders Need to Rethink Biospecimen Procurement

Originally published in Labcompare.

By Inga Rose, Founder & CEO, Reference Medicine

Cancer research is built around timelines. A team may know when it wants to complete validation, submit to a regulator, or launch a new diagnostic. Yet one of the inputs that can determine whether those milestones remain achievable is considerably less predictable: access to the right biospecimens.

Researchers are well aware of this challenge, which is why specimen sourcing is often one of the first things an R&D team considers when planning a new project. But planning early does not eliminate every bottleneck. An experiment may reveal that a collection method doesn’t work for a novel target. A regulator may decide that a validation cohort of 50 samples needs to become 500, or request evidence from an additional cancer type. A specimen that appeared suitable on paper may fail quality control or prove insufficiently characterized once it reaches the laboratory.

When that happens, a project can quickly move from "on schedule" to "blocked."

The lesson is not simply that researchers need faster access to biospecimens. It’s that we need to rethink what speed in biospecimen procurement actually means. The fastest specimen to arrive is not necessarily the specimen that gets research moving the fastest. Accelerating cancer innovation requires building procurement strategies that anticipate uncertainty, prioritizing usable specimens over impressive inventory numbers, and reducing the risk of discovering problems after the clock is already ticking.