What Your Biospecimen Procurement Partner Isn’t Telling You
Nov 19, 2025
By Inga Rose, Founder & CEO of Reference Medicine
Biospecimens are the foundation of every discovery in diagnostics, research, and drug development. They fuel the search for new therapies and assays, power clinical trials, and are at the core of the data that drives innovation in healthcare. Yet, behind the curtain of biospecimen procurement lies a malignancy — one that most researchers feel every day but never really question or may not think they can do anything about.
We all know what a (costly, time-consuming) challenge getting the high-quality specimens we need, when we need them, can be. But have you ever stopped to wonder why?
From what I have seen, researchers don’t know they can question, even challenge, the status quo, and don’t think to ask why…
- Biospecimen providers don’t list their inventories online—or why it takes weeks just to get a list
- Requested samples take so long to arrive
- Different biospecimen sellers list samples with identical genomic and demographic data
- Sample quality is so unpredictable
- The accompanying data can range from robust to almost nonexistent
- Prices seem disconnected from what’s actually provided.
Most of us in the industry have written these challenges off as just part of the process — assuming the delays and inconsistencies are there for good, ethical reasons. We convince ourselves this is just what responsible science looks like.
But it shouldn’t be this way. It doesn’t have to, either.
A Look Behind the Curtain
What most lab managers and research scientists don’t realize is that it’s possible today to act as a “biospecimen supplier” without ever even touching a biospecimen, or employing a single scientist.
The truth is, many biospecimen providers don’t collect or bank samples themselves. Rather, they resell access to material biobanked by hospitals, labs, or other suppliers.
One individual sample often becomes many listings. One patient’s tissue becomes five vendors’ “inventory”. And, researchers are left paying multiple times for the same resource without knowing who truly collected, processed, or verified it.
This “shadow network” drives up costs while driving down accountability. Every additional sample handoff introduces delay, dilutes data, and distances the researcher from the original source. Provenance becomes opaque, quality becomes unpredictable, and the integrity of the data attached to each sample—its medical history, pathology notes, genomic sequence—becomes harder to trust.
That’s how an ecosystem built to fuel innovation becomes one that often complicates and even undermines it.
