Biobanking has become during past years an extremely essential activity for medical diagnosis, clinical and fundamental research. Biological samples have now been clearly accepted by all communities as major assets for new biomarker discovery as well as for large scale genome projects and disease consortia. Biobanking practices have to dramatically change and revolutionize to bring in biorepositories quality and traceability for guaranteeing sample integrity. Only well-tracked and well-annotated biospecimens will have a real value for researchers and will generate results.
Multiple aspects can severely affect quality and traceability in biobanking and amongst most importantly are sample management and tracking and frozen specimen quality.
ALPHELYS has known to answer to both of these aspects with success with first, SnapFrost®, a liquid nitrogen-free snapfreezing system for tissue specimens (read more about SnapFrost® ) that is widely used in hospitals for frozen section diagnosis as well as for biobanking, and secondly CRESALYS® , a data base application for biobank management.

CRESALYS® is designed to protect your patients' private data. Each user can be authorized or not to access specific private data. Patient anonymization is obtained with CRESALYS® by generating a unique and anonymous ID.

CRESALYS® features a complete and uneditable audit trail that register all data insertion and modification with date and time and user connected. Data before and after modification are fully saved.

Each specimen is assigned automatically by CRESALYS® a unique identifier can be be printed as a barcode to label the corresponding tube. To maintain the tracking link between the identifiers you have been using before starting with CRESALYS® and the IDs generated by CRESALYS® , you have the possibility to register the identification which is currently carried by the tubes.

Because the value of a specimen not only resides in its intrinsic quality but also as much importantly in its attached annotations, CRESALYS® provides an environment to register as much annotations as you require for your research projects.

When it is needed to host even more annotations, ALPHELYS provides custom-services to implement the necessary annotations fields in your personal CRESALYS® biobank management system.
As a standard, CRESALYS® features ICD-10, ICD-O-3 diseases classifications and McKusick genetic diseases classification.
CRESALYS® includes as well and related to McKusick, a pedigree table to describe genetic links between patients from the same family.
Inside CRESALYS® , Patient file is structured to associate annotations with actual time/age of patient at which these annotations were collected. Doing so, CRESALYS® generates a link between specimens and the annotations corresponding to Patient condition at time of specimen collection.
You can easily generate as much specimen collections as needed and register correspondingly annotations that change.

Annotations are most of time proposed as drop down lists to significantly accelerate data capture but also to standardize data captured so that misinterpretation is eliminated and data querying is made fully possible and quick.
Most of these lists can be edited and modified/amended by administrators making your CRESALYS® extremely flexible and powerful, capable of evolutions to follow-up your needs in real time at no added cost.

Patient file is easily accessed through a tree-display interface.

Quick search interface allows to search rapidly by ID and names either Patient or specimen.
Result is provided as a list with dynamic link to allow for accessing directly the specimen or patient of choice by double-clicking in the list.
Advanced search is more complex but allows user to create any combination of query involving each and every data into CRESALYS® . This is particularly powerful when creating a list of specimen of interest for specific research projects. The large number of annotations that can be queried helps user create a list of very specific type of specimens.
Patient and specimen annotations can be queried.
The result is a list that can be exported into Excel.

Data can be imported into CRESALYS® to accelerate and facilitate the starting when historical data are in large volume.
Note that this feature is not directly accessible to user and is provided as a service by ALPHELYS.