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Hello everyone -

With increasing pressure on space, energy usage, and costs, I am hoping to gather some insights as to how other institutions are handling freezer storage management (LN2, -80, -20) for investigator-led or core-led labs.

I'd be interested in hearing best practices, or even lessons learned around the following areas:

• Inventory management: What policies or tools do you have in place to ensure regular inventory reviews, cleanup and legacy freezers? How do you encourage compliance?
• Freezer assignment models: How are freezers allocated?
• Resource constraints: What solutions have you implemented to manage limited resources, particularly space?

 Very appreciative of your thoughts and experiences!

Kety

Kety Huberman

Senior Operations Manager

 

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Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center - Zuckerman Research Center
New York NY
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Hi Kety,

I help run operations for the Johns Hopkins BioBank here in Baltimore. Here's some feedback:

Inventory management: What policies or tools do you have in place to ensure regular inventory reviews, cleanup and legacy freezers? How do you encourage compliance?

• • In 2013, our facility became accredited by the College of American Pathologists Biorepository Program. This program greatly helped us organize policies and procedures to maintain an organized, quality inventory. One of our "indicators of quality" are monthly spot checks where we check through randomly assigned freezer locations to check for accuracy. One of the key things here is to make sure you have full control of the inventory and to not make it "open access" where anyone can go in and pull samples. Only our staff are authorized to access the freezer facility and pull samples. With this specific policy, we have complete control and it has greatly minimized any inventory issues. If you have a setup where researchers can go in and pull samples themselves, most times the inventory will snowball into disorder. We also recommend managing the inventory with a powerful database or LIMS system. We use a system called BSI in our facility, but there are many options. A cloud-based system with a strong audit trail really helps manage an accurate inventory.

Freezer assignment models: How are freezers allocated?

• • All freezers in our space are controlled and allocated just to our staff. This might be a key difference with our operations. We have found making freezers a shared resource leads to massive disorganization that builds quickly over a few months. We tested this model only briefly over 10+ years ago and quickly changed to a staff-only access approach where our staff pull the samples and hand them over to the researchers. We do not allow anyone but trained personnel into the room to access material. In our facility, specimens are also split between multiple freezer units in case of equipment failures/thaws. Not sure if this helped answer your question, but feel free to let me know.

Resource constraints: What solutions have you implemented to manage limited resources, particularly space?

• • At Hopkins, space is the most valuable commodity so this can be a challenge for us. We have utilized large, specialized high capacity units to maximize storage space. We have many large MVE Vario units for -80 storage and several Taylor Wharton 40K and 80Ks for vapor phase LN2. Traditional upright electrical units are not the most space efficient (excluding Stirling freezers) and put a serious HVAC load on spaces. 

Hope this helped! Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions or comments. Always happy to help :)

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Patrick Catterson
Johns Hopkins Genomics
Baltimore MD
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Thank you both so much! Very useful and helpful information... and a lot to digest!

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Kety Huberman
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center - Zuckerman Research Center
New York NY
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