Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A cancer tissue bank holding tumour blocks and matched normal-tissue samples for downstream genomic studies.
- Is an instance
A brain bank for neurodegenerative disease research.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A storage facility for industrial chemical samples is not a tissue bank.
- Not an instance
A blood-donation centre primarily for transfusion is not, in the research sense, a tissue bank.
Editorial commentary
A tissue bank is a specialised, typically hospital-pathology-linked collection of solid human tissue specimens — formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) blocks, histology slides, and fresh-frozen tissue — maintained for research use, usually with matched clinical and pathology data. Tissue banks operate under tissue-specific legislation distinct from general research-ethics governance: in the UK, storage and use of human tissue for research is regulated under the Human Tissue Act 2004, administered by the Human Tissue Authority, which licenses premises for scheduled purposes; in the EU, the Tissues and Cells Directives (2004/23/EC and amendments) apply; in the US, FDA regulation and CAP/AABB accreditation govern tissue-bank operations.
How this differs from biobank
A tissue bank is best understood as a specific, licensed type of biobank rather than a wholly separate category: biobank is the broader governance concept — any organised collection of human biological material (blood, DNA, urine, tissue) held under human-subjects governance (ethics/IRB approval, informed consent, an access committee, defined withdrawal procedures) — while ’tissue bank’ names the narrower, solid-tissue-specific, pathology-linked practice with its own dedicated statutory licensing regime layered on top of that general biobank governance. A national population biobank collecting blood or saliva by post from thousands of volunteers is a biobank but would not conventionally be called a tissue bank, even though DNA extracted from those samples is tissue-derived — usage convention, not the underlying biology, drives which term applies.
How this differs from sample repository
As sample repository explains, any collection of human-derived material is conventionally governed as a biobank or tissue bank rather than as a generic sample repository, because human-subjects regulation applies on top of ordinary physical-specimen custodianship — a distinction that does not apply to a geological, environmental, or museum specimen collection holding no human material.
Worked example
A hospital pathology archive of FFPE tumour blocks and matched slides, linked to a cancer registry and released to researchers only under an approved research protocol and the hospital’s Human Tissue Authority research licence, is a tissue bank in the sense described here.
References
- Human Tissue Authority (UK), ‘HTA Codes of Practice’.
- EU Directive 2004/23/EC and amendments, ‘Tissues and Cells Directives’.
Also known as
Research tissue bank
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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