Abstract The Ontario Tumour Bank (OTB) is a core research resource at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, a collaborative research institute that conducts and enables research to find cancer earlier and treat it more effectively. With 20+ years of expertise in biobanking, OTB has collected 150,000+ samples and 15,000+ whole slide images (WSIs) from 22,500+ participants across 30+ solid tumor sites. Each oncology case is comprehensively annotated with diagnostic, treatment and health data for up to 5 years. OTB has a strong record of supporting research, with acknowledgements in 200+ publications and 70,000+ citations. Recently, OTB has experienced an increased demand from commercial research clients. OTB’s samples and data can be used for many commercial applications, including fresh tumor tissue for rapid drug screening; frozen tumor and normal adjacent tissue for metabolomics; formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tumor tissue for diagnostic assay development; plasma for predictive blood tests for cancer detection and monitoring; and WSIs combined with longitudinal health record data for prognostic AI model development. Academic biobanks such as OTB have several challenges when working with commercial research clients. These include ensuring its resources are visible and accessible to the commercial research community, as well as obtaining appropriate participant consent, ethics and contractual approvals. OTB has mitigated these challenges by asking participants to agree to a broad informed consent that includes use of their samples and data in commercial research and creating a researcher-focused website (ontariotumourbank.ca) that allows clients to submit inquiries and start the sample and data request process online. Each request is received by OTB’s dedicated senior client coordinator, who is the central point-of-contact for each client and facilitates each project from start to finish. To meet evolving research needs, commercial clients are provided access is to OTB’s deep “research ready” inventory as well as custom fresh tumor and blood collections shipped overnight immediately after collection. The number and proportion of projects, samples and data provided to commercial clients - including venture capital-supported biotechnology startups in Canada, the US and globally - has steadily increased over the past 5 years and now represents 1/3 of OTB’s business. By streamlining the request process for commercial clients, OTB has demonstrated its ability to meet the unmet demands of this sector, including emerging predictive AI model development in research and medicine. Supporting commercial research projects ensures that access to OTB’s deep inventory of quality samples and data is consistent with the wishes of our generous patient participants to support diverse academic and industry research, all while contributing to OTB’s long-term financial sustainability. Citation Format: Riley Cox, Katarina Maksimovic, Larry Phouthavongsy, Anumta Amir, Ilinca Lungu, Terry Hawrysh, Dianne Chadwick, Lincoln Stein. Ontario Tumour Bank: Accelerating commercial oncology research and development with quality samples and data abstract. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2026; Part 1 (Regular Abstracts); 2026 Apr 17-22; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2026;86(7 Suppl):Abstract nr 4812.
Cox et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
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