The King’s College London Haemato-Oncology Tissue Bank was established in 2005 with the help of a grant from the Leukaemia Research Fund. The bank is based in premises on the King’s College London Denmark Hill Campus, which are adjacent to King’s College Hospital, our hospital partner.

The objective of the bank is to serve as a national bioresource to facilitate basic and translational research into the aetiology, diagnosis and prognosis of blood cancers and to pursue this aim in a manner that complies with all laws, regulations and industry standards that apply to research tissue banking.

Retention of human tissues has become an increasingly regulated activity in the United Kingdom in recent years. In particular, the Human Tissue Act 2004 created the requirement for licensing of premises involved in the storage of human tissue for future (unspecified) research and introduced standards for obtaining explicit consent from tissue donors and for exercising control over the storage and subsequent use of the retained tissues. The Caldicott guidelines, the Data Protection Act 1998, the Freedom of Information Act 2000, the Human Rights Act 1998, the NHS Research Governance Framework for Health and Social Care (2001, 2005) and the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki (1964 with subsequent amendments) oblige NHS establishments and their partners to observe high standards of donor confidentiality and ethics in research activities. The King’s College London Haemato-Oncology Tissue Bank was designed to meet the requirements of these important regulations. The bank operates under the auspices of a King’s College Hospital Foundation NHS Trust Local Research Ethics Committee – approved protocol (soon to be replaced with a COREC approved protocol to allow us to obtain samples from other hospitals) and, in 2007, we were awarded an unconditional licence by the Human Tissue Authority (Licence Number 2223). The King’s College London Haemato-Oncology Tissue Bank was also designed be compliant with the industry’s standards for good laboratory practice published by Clinical Pathology Accreditation (UK) Ltd (an ISO 9000-series accreditation body).

Tissue banking is a laborious process. Our standard operating procedure takes approximately 3 hours per sample set. Such a large investment of time is justified so as to make the absolute maximum use of precious samples. For example, bone marrow from patients with myeloid diseases is fractionated into raw nucleated cells, low-density cells, high-density cells, CD34 positive progenitor cells and CD3 positive lymphocytes, to provide a range of cellular products conserved in forms suitable for subsequent DNA and RNA recovery, cytological analysis and cell culture. Samples of non-haemopoietic tissue (skin and/or buccal lavages) from the donor are also stored as a source of constitutional DNA and blood serum is stored for the assay of soluble mediators such as cytokines. The archival of these products is managed through a comprehensive database.

The King’s College London Haemato-Oncology Tissue Bank has provided tissue for a number of important research projects since it was established. To date, these projects have been based exclusively at the Department of Haematological Medicine at King’s College London. However, the purpose of LRF funding was to create a network of tissue banks to serve the needs of all UK researchers. Applications for access to material in the King’s College London Haemato-Oncology Tissue Bank must be made to the King’s College London Haemato-Oncology Tissue Bank Governance Committee, which comprises Professor GJ Mufti (Designated Individual on our HTA Licence), Dr Nigel Westwood (Tissue Bank Manager), a consultant Haematologist from King’s College Hospital (the main source of our samples to date), a senior departmental scientist, an external academic/scientific reviewer and a lay member. Initial contact can be made to nigel.westwood@kcl.ac.uk

Our vision for future of the King’s College London Haemato-Oncology Tissue Bank is to develop this into a major resource for the international research community. To do this, we need to capture the material we are currently missing from elsewhere in our geographic region, to routinely analyse our banked material for DNA genotype and RNA expression profile and to tie these elements to a solid and comprehensive clinical database that allows optimum mining of the resource. Applications to funding organisations are in hand to help us to realise these ambitions.