The 59th Annual Meeting of the Society for Low Temperature Biology, 20-22 September 2023, Vigo, Spain

Involving patients and their tissues in the research pathway is crucial for future heath innovations. There are many challenges including sustainability, logistical organisation whilst maintaining robust ethical oversight. For over a decade, TAPb has developed to become a research infrastructure to facilitate patient-centric studies across the research pipeline (from bench science, translation to human tissue and the sample component of interventional clinical trials). The TAPb platform groups researchers across academic, commercial and clinical trial sectors, and clinical services. This spreads the costs of the core team, and introduces capacity to provide specialised research services in an incremental way. TAPb is a not-for-profit, full cost recovery model that has been implemented across 7 patient clinical services within the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust. It supports an office of 6 fulltime staff, complemented by a number (currently about 7) part-time staff, to reflect the fluctuations in research demand. The researcher journey starts with TAPb linking NHS standard of care and research requirements to aid study design and feasibility. TAPb then provides suitable ethics and project management to develop timescales and delivery methodologies according to evolving research requirements, throughout the delivery phase. Samples and link-anonymised clinical data, and disease interpretation is provided to place samples in the correct research context. This presentation will provide an overview of the important steps which TAPb office have learnt which can make the infrastructure sustainable. Some examples of the significant research impact will be given as an illustration.