LiMeTrack: A lightweight biosample management platform for the multicenter SATURN3 consortium

Research projects involving patient biosamples are becoming increasingly complex and now often involve multiple institutions at multiple physical sites. This multicenter recruitment enables large patient cohorts, but also leads to often heterogeneous and incomplete metadata which needs to be synchronised between sites. In addition, patient specimens are now often being queried with several multimodal molecular and imaging techniques, posing challenges to both data integration and metadata management. Therefore, a dedicated data management strategy and accompanying platforms build the basis for a successful and reliable research project with a trustworthy data basis and reproducible analysis workflows compliant with the FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) principles. SATURN3, a national German consortium with 17 project partner sites investigates intratumoral heterogeneity across three cancer types using more than 500 patient biosamples actively collected at five of the 17 centers. As part of a complex and multicenter workflow, high-level multimodal analyses include bulk, single-cell, and spatial omics and corresponding data analysis. To manage this complexity and to avoid miscommunication, data loss and synchronization problems at different project sites, SATURN3 defined data harmonization in a central infrastructure platform as a key goal. This platform must easily be tailored to various data modalities and project-specific requirements of partaking centers. Real-time monitoring of all samples and workflows must be transparently accessible to all project partners throughout the project. Ultimately, structured exports of both experimental data and comprehensive and standardized metadata must be available at the end of the project to enable secondary data re-use. These requirements go far beyond the capabilities of spreadsheets or shared files that are susceptible to security vulnerabilities, versioning mistakes, data loss and type conversion errors. Existing platforms for biosample management are focused on standardised biobanking workflows, closed source or are too complex to adapt to specific needs of an individual research project in a limited amount of time. To address these challenges for SATURN3 and beyond, we introduce LightMetaTrack (LiMeTrack), a flexible and user-friendly online biosample management platform. LiMeTrack includes customizable and user-friendly forms for data entry and a real-time dashboard providing an overview of project and sample status. It simplifies the creation and export of standardized sample sheets, streamlining subsequent bioinformatics analyses and biomedical research workflows. By integrating real-time monitoring with robust sample tracking and data management, LiMeTrack improves research transparency and reproducibility, ensures data integrity and optimizes workflows, making it a powerful all-in-one solution for biosample management in modern multicenter biomedical research endeavours. LiMeTrack is thereby designed to be lightweight and flexible, and to only require minimal programming skills. This way, even small teams can be equipped with a robust data management solution for tracking metadata, sample processing status and overall project progress.