Ultra-cold freezers are used across Universities for the storage of biological and non-biological material used in research, these include human, animal and environmental material. Due to the diversity of samples, their value varies significantly. Nevertheless, the majority of these sample are costly to generate and many are irreplaceable. A centralised facility to efficiently manage the storage of these materials is critical to reduce the financial burden and research risks. However, such a centralised facility must have effective risk management, emergency and disaster response plans for both the samples stored and the data associated with such samples.
The University of Adelaide Biobank is a purposely-built central, secure, comprehensive, state of the art PC2 facility. It currently houses 48 Ultra-cold freezers and is fitted with multiple redundancies, alarm monitoring, extensive preventative maintenance and emergency response plans.
There are some important factors to consider when developing a successful emergency plan; Risk Identification, Risk Assessment, Risk Mitigation, Emergency Preparedness, Emergency Response and Emergency Recovery. With these in mind, The Adelaide Biobank developed a university wide cold storage management policy which includes; the use of the centralised facility for the storage of high risk material; the use of a Laboratory Information Management System to catalogue the material stored in all Ultra-cold freezers; and guidelines for the physical management and monitoring of all Ultra-cold freezers.
Since the introduction of the policy, the number of research interruptions and insurance claims resulting from freezer failures was dramatically reduced, with only one confirmed claim in the last 7 years. Due to its success, the policy now includes materials stored in liquid nitrogen vessels and -20oC degree freezers and the demand for extra storage has increased. As a result, The Adelaide Biobank is expanding to include cryogenics and -20oC degree storage as well as sample processing and other biospecimen services.