About VIVO Biobank

VIVO Biobank is the UK's leading resource dedicated to storing samples and data of cancers affecting  children and young people.

VIVO Biobank was formed by merging the CCLG Tissue Bank and Blood Cancer UK CellBank and is funded by CRUK and Blood Cancer UK. The samples are available for use in ethically-approved and funded research projects and we invite applications from UK-based and international applicants. Sample collection is ongoing.

Our samples

All children and young people with a diagnosis of cancer are eligible to bank samples with VIVO Biobank.  This means that we have samples from a wide range of cancers - both solid and liquid.

VIVO Biobank has been granted ethical approval for collection of additional samples for banking as well as for collection of leftover diagnostic samples. Where consent has been given, we ask clinical teams to send samples to VIVO Biobank. Detailed recruitment and sample collection instructions can be found on our Recruitment Instructions and Sample Information pages.

The samples we collect from participants with solid tumours are: fresh tissue, fresh-frozen tissue,  formalin fixed paraffin embedded tissue, serum, plasma and DNA. Occasionally, other relevant tissues are collected.

For participants with leukaemia we collect: bone marrow, peripheral blood and cerebrospinal fluid. These are processed at UK Biocentre to give aliquots of live cells from bone marrow, bone marrow plasma, peripheral blood plasma. CSF cells and CSF supernatant.  We will also shortly be isolating cDNA from plasma.