Introducing the Specimen Center: A Feature-Packed Discovery Platform for Biobanks and Researchers
Caspar Barnes
May 12, 2025
We’re thrilled to announce the general availability of the Specimen Center, a groundbreaking platform designed to redefine how biosamples are discovered, licensed, and managed. Built with both biobanks and researchers in mind, the Specimen Center addresses longstanding challenges in biosample accessibility, offering a comprehensive solution to enhance collaboration and streamline workflows.
Traditional specimen locator platforms often fall short, functioning merely as collection directories rather than providing detailed sample-level information. This limitation forces researchers to spend significant time and resources contacting multiple biobanks to identify samples that match their study criteria. Biobanks are therefore burdened with managing inquiries that rarely lead to meaningful sample utilization, compounding operational inefficiencies in an already resource-strapped environment.
Recognizing these inefficiencies, the Specimen Center was designed to facilitate precise and efficient biosample discovery. Researchers can now search multiple biobank inventories at an unprecedented level of granularity, accessing harmonized, de-identified metadata that ensures clarity and usability. Whether searching for “carcinomas,” “malignant neoplasms,” or “adenocarcinomas,” the platform ensures that users find exactly what they need, regardless of terminology variations. Advanced filtering capabilities allow searches by specimen type, donor demographics, diagnoses, or therapeutic areas, with customizations and pre-sets to further refine results. Additionally, AI-driven insights and recommendations enhance the user experience, enabling researchers to locate the most relevant samples with ease.
While the Specimen Center empowers researchers, it is equally committed to supporting biobanks. Unlike traditional biospecimen brokerage models that often require biobanks to relinquish control or obscure their visibility, the Specimen Center places autonomy at the forefront. Biobanks retain full oversight of their collections, deciding which samples to list and managing inquiries directly. Transparent peer-to-peer interactions foster trust, while intuitive dashboards will provide actionable insights into inventory trends, customer interactions, and transaction statuses. By enabling biobanks to maintain ownership of their resources while enhancing operational transparency, the platform offers a sustainable, modular solution tailored to a biobank's specific needs.
The Specimen Center’s operational tools are designed to help biobanks better manage the complex data and workflows surrounding biosample inquiries and transactions. We understand the value of insights that exist between and around sample acquisition and aim to make these actionable for providers, enabling them to focus on meaningful engagements while maintaining clarity over their resources. By simplifying processes and offering tools that adapt to unique biobank needs, the platform supports smarter decision-making and fosters collaboration.
At its core, the Specimen Center is more than just a platform—it is a catalyst for change in the biobanking ecosystem. By breaking down barriers in biosample research and fostering direct connections between stakeholders, it opens new opportunities for innovation and collaboration. Whether you’re a researcher seeking advanced tools for study design or a biobank striving to increase visibility and utilization, the Specimen Center is designed to meet your unique needs.
This is just the beginning of a transformative journey. Join us in shaping the future of biosample research. Explore the Specimen Center today and discover a world of possibilities.
Explore the Specimen Center today and experience the difference.
Learn more and sign up here
©2025 AminoChain
©2025 AminoChain
Introducing the Specimen Center: A Feature-Packed Discovery Platform for Biobanks and Researchers
Biobanks are the backbone of biomedical research and drug discovery, safeguarding millions of human biospecimens including blood, tissue, DNA, and other biological materials, collected from donors across a variety of healthcare, research, and clinical settings. These invaluable resources fuel breakthroughs in disease research, new treatments, and the advancement of personalized medicine.
Caspar Barnes
May 12, 2025
We’re thrilled to announce the general availability of the Specimen Center, a groundbreaking platform designed to redefine how biosamples are discovered, licensed, and managed. Built with both biobanks and researchers in mind, the Specimen Center addresses longstanding challenges in biosample accessibility, offering a comprehensive solution to enhance collaboration and streamline workflows.
We’re thrilled to announce the general availability of the Specimen Center, a groundbreaking platform designed to redefine how biosamples are discovered, licensed, and managed. Built with both biobanks and researchers in mind, the Specimen Center addresses longstanding challenges in biosample accessibility, offering a comprehensive solution to enhance collaboration and streamline workflows.
Our Motivation
Traditional specimen locator platforms often fall short, functioning merely as collection directories rather than providing detailed sample-level information. This limitation forces researchers to spend significant time and resources contacting multiple biobanks to identify samples that match their study criteria. Biobanks are therefore burdened with managing inquiries that rarely lead to meaningful sample utilization, compounding operational inefficiencies in an already resource-strapped environment.
Recognizing these inefficiencies, the Specimen Center was designed to facilitate precise and efficient biosample discovery. Researchers can now search multiple biobank inventories at an unprecedented level of granularity, accessing harmonized, de-identified metadata that ensures clarity and usability. Whether searching for “carcinomas,” “malignant neoplasms,” or “adenocarcinomas,” the platform ensures that users find exactly what they need, regardless of terminology variations. Advanced filtering capabilities allow searches by specimen type, donor demographics, diagnoses, or therapeutic areas, with customizations and pre-sets to further refine results. Additionally, AI-driven insights and recommendations enhance the user experience, enabling researchers to locate the most relevant samples with ease.
While the Specimen Center empowers researchers, it is equally committed to supporting biobanks. Unlike traditional biospecimen brokerage models that often require biobanks to relinquish control or obscure their visibility, the Specimen Center places autonomy at the forefront. Biobanks retain full oversight of their collections, deciding which samples to list and managing inquiries directly. Transparent peer-to-peer interactions foster trust, while intuitive dashboards will provide actionable insights into inventory trends, customer interactions, and transaction statuses. By enabling biobanks to maintain ownership of their resources while enhancing operational transparency, the platform offers a sustainable, modular solution tailored to a biobank's specific needs.
The Specimen Center’s operational tools are designed to help biobanks better manage the complex data and workflows surrounding biosample inquiries and transactions. We understand the value of insights that exist between and around sample acquisition and aim to make these actionable for providers, enabling them to focus on meaningful engagements while maintaining clarity over their resources. By simplifying processes and offering tools that adapt to unique biobank needs, the platform supports smarter decision-making and fosters collaboration.
At its core, the Specimen Center is more than just a platform—it is a catalyst for change in the biobanking ecosystem. By breaking down barriers in biosample research and fostering direct connections between stakeholders, it opens new opportunities for innovation and collaboration. Whether you’re a researcher seeking advanced tools for study design or a biobank striving to increase visibility and utilization, the Specimen Center is designed to meet your unique needs.
This is just the beginning of a transformative journey. Join us in shaping the future of biosample research. Explore the Specimen Center today and discover a world of possibilities.
Explore the Specimen Center today and experience the difference.
Learn more and sign up here
Explore the Specimen Center today and experience the difference.
Learn more and sign up here.
AminoChain is a technology that connects enterprise medical institutions, providing the basis for developers to build user-owned decentralized healthcare applications.
Medical institutions install a software package called the “Amino Node”, which integrates into the institution's endogenous tech stacks (e.g. their EMR’s, Inventory Management Softwares, Data Capture Softwares etc). While data stays self-custodial on the given institutions servers, the Node software harmonizes and standardizes the data into a common format, making it interoperable with a network of collaborators. The Node software thereby sources data from all providers and brings credible neutrality to the network; from this basis, developers can source data from a multitude of medical bodies and build any number of patient centric applications.
The first application built on AminoChain, is a peer to peer bio-sample marketplace called the “Specimen Center”. In the Specimen Center, biobank inventories and their associated data are harmonized into a common format, making research samples searchable and requestable across a network of providers.
As context, biobanks are storage facilities for human tissue used in scientific research or clinical applications. Biobanks are used by researchers who are looking to create cures for new and existing diseases, as well as studying a population’s health to help prevent future outbreaks of infectious disease.
However, biobanks suffer from a dire lack of interoperability; it takes an average of 8 weeks emailing back and forth before researchers find the samples they need, sign a licensing agreement, and a sample is shipped.
With Specimen Center biobanks can now give permission for researchers and collaborators to query their sample collections, and they can equally query for research assets available to them. Between institutions, users can streamline licensing agreements, track sample and data use, and maintain full provenance of biosamples across an interoperable network of biobanks.
The best part of all of this: any biobank can enable features that let their patients/ sample donors track where their samples go in the network, learn from the information generated on their samples, and earn money back whenever their samples are commercialized or sold. What separates the AminoChain Specimen Center from traditional biosample marketplaces is the ability to embed transparency and benefit-sharing with the very people that make the marketplace valuable: the patients. Our goal is to prove that you can create an incredibly successful business by placing bioethics at the heart of the business model; if you care for the patient experience first and foremost, then downstream, everyone in the industry will benefit.
Our Vision for the Future
While the Specimen Center is the first application built on AminoChain, and biobanks are the first institutions being connected, these are just the first examples of what applications can be built and how big the network can be.
Medical bodies in the AminoChain network will be able to benefit from decentralized applications in clinical recruitment, clinical trial management, decentralized AI and federated learning, to name a few examples. In a world where science and healthcare applications are becoming increasingly user owned and self-custodial, AminoChain will be a key coordination layer to connect disparate data sources with bio-medical enterprises.
Our vision is to build the world's first HIPAA and GDPR compliant blockchain for the healthcare industry - a platform on which any company, network, non-profit, or lone scientist can source and build with compliant healthcare data. AminoChain is building more than a platform to improve bio-sample distribution; we’re building an entirely new bioeconomy. Within this new economy our mission is to streamline clinical R&D, improve academic-industry partnerships, and above all, to have patients be the very first to benefit from their participation in scientific research.
To help us achieve this vision we’re thrilled to bring on two investors with very different areas of expertise - a16z crypto and Cercano. This $5M seed round led by a16z crypto, brings our total funding to date to $7M.
Having worked closely with the a16z crypto team through the CSX London accelerator, we’ve been incredibly impressed with their deep technical and operating expertise, and we’re excited to welcome them aboard. We’re also very excited to welcome Cercano to the cap table. Having worked closely with the Cercano team over the last few months, we’ve been particularly impressed with their depth and breadth of knowledge across the Life Sciences, and we’re excited to work closely with their connected partners.
If you are a world class engineer or developer, a die-hard operator, or a true wordsmith and visionary, we would love to have you apply to join us. We are currently hiring across a number of founding roles and attached are our open positions and career’s page primer. We can’t wait to hear from you, and we’re excited to have you join our mission of bringing trust to science and healthcare.
There is nothing more personal than your body.
Every year thousands of people do an incredible service to humanity by providing the medical community with samples of their blood, saliva, and cancer tissue to help researchers develop new lifesaving medicines that benefit all of us.
Unfortunately, today, the data collected from these highly sensitive and personal samples and data, is a one way street.
Bio-sample donors are asked if their sample can be used for scientific research, they sign a consent document, the researcher takes the bio-sample, and the two part ways and never see each other again. The journey of donated samples is a black box for donors, and consent rates at major institutions are now as low as 25%.
While this data has immense potential to drive medical breakthroughs and improve patient care, its centralized storage and control (1) put a massive drag on scientific progress and the improvement of patient outcomes, and (2) prevent provenance and users’ consent management.
Limited Sample Visibility & Accessibility
Most biobanks operate in silos, with no centralized system for researchers to search, compare, or request samples across multiple repositories. This lack of visibility leads to duplicated collections, wasted resources, and underutilized specimens, slowing down critical research.
Cumbersome & Bureaucratic Procurement Processes
The process of acquiring biospecimens is manual, fragmented, and painfully slow. Researchers must contact multiple biobanks, negotiate Material Transfer Agreements (MTAs), verify ethical approvals, and coordinate logistics – a process that often takes 8+ weeks for a single transaction.
Lack of Transparency & Compliance Oversight
Once a sample is collected, it often disappears into a “black box”, with little traceability on its future use. Donors remain uninformed about how their contributions are used, while institutions struggle to enforce consent terms and regulatory compliance (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, IRB approvals).