The Ottawa Hospital Research Institute has grown rapidly to become one of the largest and most important hospital-based research institutions in Canada and with this growth comes the development of our new Biorepository .

The facility is located in the Loeb building at the Civic Campus, of The Ottawa Hospital (map) and officially opened in January 2012 with the transfer of 86,000 samples from the pilot phase of the Ontario Health Study.

Along with the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR), the Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion (OAHPP), and the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI), the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute Biorepository is currently facilitating the Ontario Health Study (OHS), a major ongoing research study that is investigating risk factors associated with disease, by processing, accessioning and storing all of its biospecimens.

One of the major goals of the Biorepository is to make a state-of-the-art facility available to researchers at The Ottawa Hospital and to help promote the safe handling, receipt, storage, inventory control, packaging and distribution for all sample types, The Ottawa Hospital Research Institute Biorepository is an extremely valuable resource for researchers and has the capability to track and store hundreds of thousands of biological samples in vapour-phase liquid nitrogen.

Facility
The Ottawa Hospital Research Institute Biorepository is a large-scale operation with a 1,200 square foot facility located in the basement of the Loeb building of The Ottawa Hospital’s Civic Campus. The facility is currently outfitted with six top-of-the-line cryogenic freezers, each with a 90,000 sample capacity. These high-efficiency vapour storage freezers are monitored to ensure temperature and liquid nitrogen levels are maintained within specified parameters. The Biorepository also utilizes a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS), BioBank, which enables staff to archive, trace, and manage sample and laboratory information. This ensures complete traceability on samples and associated information.