Navigating the Complexity: The FIND Biobank Dashboard to serve the complex FIND Biobank Ecosystem
The Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) Biobank plays a pivotal role as it stands at the intersection of various stakeholders. The management of over 600,000 biobanked samples is a multifaceted process, with the FIND Biobank team overseeing these resources from different locations; Geneva, Cape-Town, and Kilifi.
The samples themselves are located across seven storage sites in six different countries. This includes the primary Biobank in the United States and six FIND Integrated Biobanks (FIBs) located in Peru, South Africa, Moldova, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of The Congo. Notably, FIND's dedication to enhancing biobanking capacity in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) paves the way for the continued expansion of FIB sites.
Furthermore, the primary objective of collecting and storing these samples is to make them available to researchers developing diagnostic tests. The visibility of FIND's samples to potential requesters worldwide is thus essential.
To ensure that the decision-making process for sample requests is informed and timely, Specimen Bank Review Committees (SBRCs) play a critical role. These committees consist of disease experts at FIND who operate independently from the Biobank team, and they are responsible for approving or rejecting sample requests.
In response to the challenges associated with these diverse needs, wega was commissioned to create the FIND Biobank Dashboard. wega's task involved consolidating data from various sources, including Salesforce and Form Titan OpenSpecimen. wega transformed a Form stack submission form into an application where users can register and request samples. This dashboard boasts several features, such as a visualization page where users can interact with various filters to view the samples in the FIND Biobank. There is also a sample request submission page that allows users to select samples from the visualization. Furthermore, the dashboard enables us to perform additional tasks, including invoice creation.