Perth-founded Australian health systems provider, Working Systems Solutions has been commissioned to create a cell bank inventory database to help track of cryo-preserved cell samples stored at the Australian Stem Cell Centre laboratories.
Working Systems' e-health division, Global Health Pty Ltd, is the operational end of the contract. Working Systems was founded in Perth in 1985, listed in 2000 and retains a research and development unit in WA.
The ASCC is a national consortium-based initiative uniting many of Australia's leading academic researchers and the biotechnology industry with the aim of developing products for stem cell therapies. Potential outcomes include regenerating heart muscle after a heart attack, manufacturing transfusable blood products, and reversing the tissue damage following an injury.
Warwick Murphy, Laboratory Manager at ASCC, said cell samples are stored inside Liquid nitrogen "vapour-phase" tanks with each tank holding up to 22,000 samples.
"To keep accurate records of sample characteristics, cell line history and culture conditions is a nightmare without an efficient database," he said. "Currently that information is in different places. Some is recorded manually in workbooks and other information is kept in Excel spreadsheets. So it can be extremely time consuming to collate and collect all of the information with regard to each cell. As the number of cell samples grows, it becomes increasingly difficult."
The cell line inventory management system being developed by Global Health will record all of the information about each sample in a single database and will track the passage of cell lines through quarantine and storage within the centre. When cell lines are provided to investigators for research purposes, the ASCC will be able to produce a comprehensive report about the sample within seconds. Currently it can take up to an hour to produce such a report.
The project is scheduled to be completed in January 2006.
The ASCC initiative follows the recent announcement by Working Systems that Global Health had been selected by the Australasian Biospecimen Network to develop a national tissue database to assist cancer researchers around the world.
