The utility of a biospecimen for research purposes depends a great deal on the degree of annotation associated with the biospecimen. The GTEx pilot study used the Comprehensive Data Resource (CDR) to facilitate the input and analysis of multiple data types related to informed consent, the donor's medical history, biospecimen collection and handling, and pathology annotations. The CDR is a distributed, multi-tenant informatics platform that controls display and access to data based on user roles and entitlements. Personally identifiable information and protected health information were restricted to a limited data set and to individuals with authorized access through dynamic content redaction.
