To meet the challenging biospecimen requirements of the GTEx pilot study, NCI's BBRB and its partners developed a novel infrastructure for collecting normal human biospecimens for research purposes. BBRB, together with the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, developed an operational plan to contract medical centers and OPOs to screen potential donors, consent next-of-kin, and collect and ship biospecimens. Each BSS complied with their respective institution's biospecimen handling policies to procure GTEx biospecimens that were sent to a central, separately contracted Comprehensive Biospecimen Resource (CBR).
