Biobanks provide stored material to basic, translational and epidemiological research and this material should be transferred without institute-dependent intrinsic bias.

The ISBER Biospecimen Science Working Group has released a “Standard PREanalytical Code” (SPREC), which is a proposal for a standard coding of the preanalytical options which have been adopted, in order to track and make explicit preanalytic variations in collection, preparation and storage of specimens. Each biospecimen is assigned a seven-element-long code that correspond to seven preanalytical variables and contains a string of letters(different for fluid or for solid tissues) in a defined order, separated by hypens.